A federal court in the District of Columbia last week dismissed a suit against U.S. personal care product giant Kimberly-Clark Corp. and Ansell Healthcare Products, which alleged that the companies knowingly benefited from taking part in a venture that engaged in forced labor. Judge Carl Michols held that Kimberly-Clark and Ansell didn't take part in a venture and didn't have the "requisite knowledge" to establish liability under the Trafficking Victims Protection and Reauthorization Act (Mohammed Forhad Mia, et al. v. Kimberly-Clark, et al., D.D.C. # 1:22-02353).

The Court of International Trade on March 13 severed exporter Fontaine's case against the expedited countervailing duty investigation on softwood lumber products from Canada from the consolidated action on the review. Judge Mark Barnett sustained the review "with respect to Fontaine," ordering that the relevant entries be liquidated in line with the court's decision. In January, Barnett sustained the Commerce Department's use of Fontaine's FY 2015 tax returns to calculate the amount of the tax benefits received by the company (see 2501290040). The remaining issues in the case are unrelated to Fontaine (Committee Overseeing Action for Lumber International Trade Investigations or Negotiations v. United States, CIT # 19-00122).

Exporter Kaptan Demir Celik Endustrisi ve Ticaret will appeal a recent decision at the Court of International Trade, which held that the Commerce Department reasonably used Kaptan's invoice date as the date of sale in the 2021-22 administrative review of the antidumping duty order on steel concrete rebar from Turkey (see 2501150021). In the decision, the court also upheld Commerce's differences-in-merchandise adjustment, finding that the adjustment wasn't distortive in the way that it controlled for inflation (Kaptan Demir Celik Endustrisi ve Ticaret v. United States, CIT # 24-00018).

Chinese drone maker DJI urged the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to compel the Pentagon to provide its counsel with classified information in the company's suit against its designation as a Chinese military company. DJI argued that the information is "undoubtedly" relevant since DOD used it as the basis for DJI's designation, and that disclosure is needed because the court can't evaluate the designation without access to the "very information on which that designation is based" (SZ DJI Technology Co. v. U.S. Department of Defense, D.D.C. # 24-02970).

Importer Houston Shutters defended its Section 1581(i) case at the Court of International Trade against the Commerce Department's failure to open a changed circumstances review of antidumping and countervailing duty determinations on wood moldings and millwork products from China. Filing a reply brief on March 12, Houston Shutters said jurisdiction doesn't require it to challenge Commerce's investigations, adding that Commerce itself uses the reviews to consider information that wasn't present during the investigation (Houston Shutters v. U.S., CIT # 24-00193).

Four Indonesian citizens filed suit on March 12 in a California federal court alleging that tuna seller Bumble Bee Foods violated the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act by knowingly benefiting from a venture that engaged in forced labor. The four individuals -- Akhmad, Angga and Muhammad Sahrudin and Muhammad Syafi'i -- said they worked as laborers on longline fishing vessels that Bumble Bee sourced its albacore tuna from and alleged that the company knowingly benefited from their forced labor (Akhmad Sahrudin v. Bumblee Bee Foods, S.D. Cal. # 3:25-00583).

The Commerce Department excluded seven types of bricks imported by Fedmet Resources Corp. from the scope of the antidumping and countervailing duty orders on magnesia carbon bricks from China on remand at the Court of International Trade. The agency said, under protest, that the seven brick types had an "above-zero quantity of alumina and were based on testing procedures which properly determined the alumina content at the time of importation" (Fedmet Resources Corp. v. United States, CIT # 23-00117).

The U.S. agreed to apply Section 232 steel tariff exclusions to 13 of importer California Steel Industries' entries. Filing a stipulated judgment at the Court of International Trade on March 11, California Steel and the government said they settled all issues in the case, additionally noting that Section 232 duties applied to one of the importer's entries will be "final and non-protestable" (California Steel Industries v. United States, CIT # 21-00015).

Importer JBF Bahrain and the U.S. are progressing toward a settlement of the importer's customs case on CBP's denial of duty-free treatment under the U.S.-Bahrain Free Trade Agreement for the company's polyethylene terephthalate (PET) film imports. Filing a joint status report on March 12 at the Court of International Trade, JBF said it has "resolved technical issues and provided document production to the defendant," while the U.S., through CBP, continues to examine "representative samples of the raw materials, intermediate product, and imported product" (JBF Bahrain v. United States, CIT # 23-00067).

Two Chinese exporters of chlorinated isocyanurates said March 7 that the Commerce Department was right to not hit them with an adverse inference when they couldn’t locate information for a review (Bio-Lab, Inc. v. United States, CIT # 24-00118).