EU Criticizes US Plans for 10% Tariff Over Forced Labor Concerns

BRUSSELS — The European Commission criticized U.S. plans to impose a new 10 percent tariff on the EU on Wednesday after the Trump administration found that Brussels had failed to ban the import of goods made with forced labor.

“The Commission will carefully analyse the preliminary findings of the investigation and will continue engaging with the U.S. Administration. That said, the EU considers tariffs imposed on these grounds to be unjustified,” Deputy Chief Spokesperson Olof Gill said in a statement.

The U.S. Trade Representative’s Office, in a report released late Tuesday, said it wanted to reimpose the 10 percent tariff on its main trading partners — including the European Union, Canada and Mexico — after finding that they had failed to enforce laws to prohibit goods made with forced labor.

It’s one of two sprawling trade investigations the administration launched this spring, under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, in an effort to restore U.S. President Donald Trump’s global tariffs struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in February. A 10 percent interim tariff now in force is due to apply in July, and the Section 301 tariff would follow.

Bernd Lange, the influential chair of the European Parliament’s trade committee, said that Washington was “desperately searching for new legal grounds to sustain its tariff policy” following its Supreme Court defeat.

“Accusing the EU of not doing enough against forced labour is absurd,” Lange wrote in a post on X. “The EU has adopted the world’s most stringent rules against products made with forced labour. This looks very much like trying to make the facts fit a legal justification for tariffs that has already been decided.”

Shared objective

Gill stressed that the EU had adopted in 2024 a regulation banning products made with forced labor, and that this shared objective of “elimination of forced labour in supply chains” was also listed in the EU-U.S. joint statement from last August that elaborated the Turnberry accord.

The EU’s forced labor regulation will, however, only apply from Dec. 2027. This is the justification cited by the U.S. Trade Representative for applying a 10 percent tariff on goods coming from the bloc.

“Although the European Union has adopted a forced labor import prohibition, the prohibition does not come into application until December 14, 2027,” it says in the report. “In light of the above, USTR finds that the European Union is failing to effectively enforce its forced labor import prohibition.”

The 10 percent tariff, which would come on top of pre-existing most-favored nation tariffs, again puts a transatlantic trade truce at risk.

Under a deal struck last July at Trump’s golf resort in Turnberry, Scotland, the EU agreed to scrap imports on U.S. industrial goods while a tariff ceiling of 15 percent would apply to most European goods.

The European Parliament is due to hold a final vote on legislation to enact the Turnberry accord on June 16, and Trump’s latest tariff move could harden opposition among MEPs to the accord.

The latest announcement by Washington came hours before the EU trade chief Maroš Šefčovič is due to meet with U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer on the margins of a meeting of OECD ministers in Paris.