The Trump administration has brought up a proposal for new tariffs of 10% and 12.5% on imports from 60 trading partners after it said it determined that they failed to curb trade in goods made with forced labor, a finding described by a senior EU lawmaker as "utterly absurd."
The proposal from the U.S. Trade Representative's (USTR) office, issued late on Tuesday, comes from a Section 301 unfair trade practices investigation designed to help rebuild U.S. President Donald Trump's emergency tariffs, which were struck down by a U.S. Supreme Court decision in February.
The USTR proposed 10% additional duties on imports from Canada, Ecuador, the European Union, Indonesia, Mexico, Pakistan, Argentina, Bangladesh, Cambodia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Britain. The USTR said all had plans or partial schemes in place.
The trade agency also said it would impose additional duties of 12.5% on the remaining 45 countries that it investigated. These include China, India, Nigeria, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand.
"The failure of our most important trading partners to address the importation of goods made with forced labor is unacceptable," U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said in a statement.
