Wassenaar Disrupted by COVID-19 Pandemic, Commerce Officials Say

The COVID-19 pandemic is causing “significant disruption” for the Wassenaar Arrangement, leading to the cancelation of at least one meeting and creating uncertainty about whether the group can remotely vote on new export controls, two Commerce Department officials said. Wassenaar was forced to cancel its April Experts Group meeting -- which normally addresses issues related to its lists of controlled items -- and is unsure if global travel restrictions will force cancellations of future meetings in June and its annual plenary session in December.

“The idea of international travel resuming by mid-June is not looking too good,” said John Varesi, an official with the Commerce Department Bureau of industry and Security's Sensors and Aviation Division, speaking during an April 28 Sensors and Information Technical Advisory Committee meeting. “There has been a pretty significant disruption to the work … and not a lot is definitive at the moment.” The group planned to move its Experts Group meeting to the summer, which is usually reserved for informal technical working groups, Varesi said. That plan is “still in place,” he said, although it could change.

Varesi added that the group has no procedure for voting on export control proposals remotely but hopes to at least find some minor changes it can make virtually. “There was talk of [identifying] possibly some easy items, an editorial fix, that maybe there was a way to do that. But so far there's still hope that we will meet in person and address things there,” Varesi said. “The in-person requirement, at least at this point, is still in place.”

Both Varesi and Matt Borman, Commerce’s deputy assistant secretary for export administration, said BIS has been able to complete some work on multilateral controls despite the Wassenaar uncertainty. Borman said Commerce has “another group of emerging technology controls that have been agreed to multilaterally,” including some from the Wassenaar Arrangement and some from the Australia Group, another export control body. “We’re working on getting [those] through the clearance process to get published,” Borman said during the TAC meeting.

BIS has also made “some efforts to get some conversations going” with Wassenaar members on new export controls, Varesi said, and exchanged a “first round” of comments and suggestions with countries last week. “We're still digesting them,” he said. Varesi said Commerce has proposed a “number” of controls, including controls on Category 3 electronics on the Commerce Control List. “Not having the in-person interaction obviously adds a huge burden to this process,” he said, “but we’re moving forward.”

The uncertainty is concerning for U.S. exporters, many of whom advocate for multilateral support instead of unilateral controls, which can cause their customers to seek suppliers without similar export restrictions, a technology industry official said. Some in industry are unsure if Wassenaar has a contingency plan if its Experts Group cannot meet before its October meeting, which is “when they would be making decisions on proposals,” the official said. “That would be pretty late in the cycle to be making decisions without the normal negotiations that go on in regards to international controls.” Virtual teleconferences for Wassenaar groups may be feasible, said trade lawyer Doug Jacobson, adding that he is also unsure how the group will proceed. “They circulate a lot of things electronically,” Jacobson said, “so you would think that a lot of that still could be done.”

It is unclear how the uncertainty will impact Commerce’s current effort to issue controls for emerging technologies. BIS officials have said they intend to propose the emerging technology controls at multilateral export groups and plan to propose BIS's January rule on geospatial imagery software at Wassenaar (see 2002040057).