European Court Upholds Anti-Dumping Duties on Chinese Solar Panels (February 28, 2017) [1]
On February 28, 2017, the General Court of the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled [3] in JingAo Solar Co. Ltd v. Council of the European Union to uphold a set of duties that the European Council imposed on solar panel imports from China. According to the press release [4], the duties stemmed from a European Commission investigation in 2012 and 2013—which revealed that companies were selling the panels well below normal market value—and were imposed to mitigate damage from the unfair commercial practice to the EU industry. The Court found that lawmakers didn’t err in assigning duties to the twenty-six companies that had sued and that they had properly included solar panels made in other states but consigned to Chinese companies to be Chinese products since the origin of export was China. The Court also rejected “the argument that the rates of duties determined by the Council are excessive compared with what is necessary to remedy the injury caused to the EU industry by the dumped imports” and found that the Council accurately distinguished other potential causes of injury from the dumped imports.