Vietnamese Honey Exporters Seek Reinstatement of Case After Complaint Not Filed
Honey exporters led by Ban Me Thuot Honeybee Joint Stock Company asked the Court of International Trade on June 17 to accept their amended complaint and overturn the clerical dismissal of their case challenging the 2021-23 antidumping duty review on raw honey from Vietnam (Ban Me Thuot Honeybee Joint Stock Company v. United States, CIT # 25-00085).
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The exporters said that they had believed that they had filed their initial complaint on June 2. That day, they had also shared the document with the United States, telling it the complaint had been filed with the trade court and seeking consent for a Form 24 statutory injunction.
They then sought that Form 24 statutory injunction two days later, on June 4, still believing they’d filed their complaint on June 2. The injunction was granted by the court June 5.
But their case was dismissed by the trade court clerk June 16 for lack of prosecution. This was the first time the exporters realized their complaint hadn’t been filed, they said.
They asked the court to vacate the dismissal for “mistake, inadvertence, surprise, or excusable neglect” under Rule 60(b)(1). The “excusable neglect” that occurred, they said, was their counsel’s failure to confirm that the complaint had been filed. Generally, the U.S. doesn’t consent to Form 24 statutory injunctions until the filing of a complaint, so the attorney assumed the filing had been successful, they said.
They noted that the U.S. had received the complaint already, so it wasn’t prejudiced by the error. The attorney had also been acting in good faith when he made the error -- for example, by providing the government the complaint as soon as he believed it had been filed, they said.