World Customs Organization: Role and Instruments
The WCO as custodian of the Harmonized System, the Revised Kyoto Convention, the SAFE Framework of Standards, and the AEO mutual recognition network.
The World Customs Organization is the intergovernmental body, established in 1952 as the Customs Co-operation Council, that maintains the instruments customs administrations work to. It has no enforcement power of its own; its instruments bind through the conventions and national laws that adopt them.
The full article will cover the Harmonized System Convention and the nomenclature it carries, the Revised Kyoto Convention on the simplification and harmonization of customs procedures, the SAFE Framework of Standards to Secure and Facilitate Global Trade and the Authorized Economic Operator programme within it, the Customs Valuation and origin work, and the WCO’s relationship with the WTO instruments that give several of these legal force.
For shipping the WCO matters most through classification, which sets the duty rate, and through the security and supply-chain standards that reach the terminal and the carrier rather than only the importer.