EAPA Plaintiff Drops Public Summaries Argument at CIT After CBP Reopens the Record

Aspects Furniture International, plaintiff in an Enforce and Protect Act case, is waiving its arguments about CBP's lack of public summaries in an evasion proceeding, the plaintiff told the Court of International Trade in a Dec. 20 motion. Asking the court to partially waive its November order on the public summaries, Aspects said that, because CBP is reopening the record to allow revised public versions of certain documents to be submitted and requesting that the plaintiff resubmit most of the public version submissions made during the investigation, the court's order is no longer needed (Aspects Furniture International v. United States, CIT # 20-03824).

The burden of complying with this request "would greatly outweigh the practical benefits of prevailing on this particular issue," Aspects said. Further, the plaintiff said that the judicial protective order in the case cured the lack of public summaries.

The case concerns the EAPA investigation that found that Aspects evaded antidumping duties on wooden bedroom furniture from China. Aspects took to the trade court to argue, among other things, that CBP violated its due process protections by failing to include a mechanism through which it could access the complete and unredacted record behind the evasion finding (see 2011160031).

The court, citing the key Royal Brush v. U.S. CIT opinion, held that CBP failed to provide Aspects with adequate public summaries of the record's confidential information, given that the record does not have a summary of the redacted information in the verification report (see 2211290078). The court said this was a "problematic" prospect since CBP heavily leans on the verification report in its evasion finding. As such, the court remanded the issue to Commerce.

But after CBP said it was reopening the record, Aspects moved to partially vacate the parts of the court's order pertaining to the lack of public summaries after it came to the "realization" that the burden was too great and the need for the order was effectively gone given the judicial protective order. "With this realization in mind, Plaintiff respectfully submits that it would promote judicial economy and it would greatly conserve the resources of both Plaintiff and CBP if, from a practical perspective, no party would have to re-submit their public version submissions during the remand proceedings," the brief said. Success on the public summaries claim "will bring little or no practical benefit in the ongoing remand proceedings," Aspects claimed.

The U.S. did not oppose the motion.