Trade & Customs Watch is our weekly briefing on the customs, tariff and trade-regulatory developments that matter to businesses moving goods across borders and to the administrations that control them. Each item is drawn from the primary record and linked to it, with a short note on what it means in practice.
The week in brief
A quieter week on the legislative front in the United Kingdom and the European Union, where the CBAM regulations on both sides stand unchanged and the Union Customs Code recast continues on its published timetable, but a busier one at the operational level. In Kenya, the Revenue Authority has issued the formal notice that switches off its own cargo-tracking seals for dry cargo and vehicles on 26 October and hands tracking to fifteen approved private vendors. In Brussels, the Commission and the EU Intellectual Property Office reported a record 196 million counterfeit items detained in 2025, most of them arriving in postal and express consignments. The World Customs Organization released a standardised rules-of-origin training package built on the AfCFTA rules, and reported on integrity risk-mapping work with Ukrainian Customs at operational level. In Viet Nam, the amended Customs Law adopted in August takes effect on 1 March 2027 and its implementing decree and circular are out in draft, while a new customs penalty decree already applies. One item on Iraq’s customs duty arrangements was held back because no primary government record could be located.
Kenya: KRA confirms the 26 October switch to vendor-owned electronic cargo seals
Kenya Revenue Authority, 16 October 2026. The Commissioner of Customs and Border Control issued Public Notice 2401, addressed to importers, exporters, clearing and forwarding agents, transporters, bonded warehouse operators and the East African Community Partner States, confirming that the Multi-Vendor User-Owned Framework of the Regional Electronic Cargo Tracking System (RECTS) comes into effect on 26 October 2026. From that date KRA-owned electronic seals on dry cargo and motor vehicles cease to operate and goods under customs control may only be monitored with devices from approved vendors. KRA-owned e-fuel seals for wet cargo are to be phased out progressively, with no end date given. The notice states that the framework rests on private commercial agreements between vendors and users, to which KRA is not a party, and that users may choose any approved vendor. The companion Public Notice 2393 of 11 September lists the fifteen approved vendors and records that the multi-vendor model covers both dry-cargo e-seals and wet-cargo e-fuel seals.
What it means. For anyone moving goods under customs control through Mombasa and along the Northern Corridor, the cost and the contract for cargo tracking move from the administration to the trader on Monday. Importers, transporters and bonded operators who have not yet signed with an approved vendor should do so now, and should check that the vendor’s devices and platform are accepted at every Partner State border they cross, since the RECTS framework is regional. Operators of bulk liquid and fuel cargo face a less tidy position: vendors able to serve wet cargo exist, but the date by which KRA’s own e-fuel seals disappear has not been fixed, so those operators should ask the Cargo Monitoring Unit for the interim arrangements in writing. For administrations elsewhere considering a user-pays, multi-vendor model for tracking devices, the Kenyan notices are a useful template for what must be published before cutover: the vendor list, the effective date by cargo type, and the statement of who contracts with whom.
European Union: record 196 million counterfeit items detained in 2025
European Commission, Directorate-General for Taxation and Customs Union, 22 October 2026. The Commission and the European Union Intellectual Property Office published their joint report on EU enforcement of intellectual property rights for 2025. Customs, market surveillance authorities and police intercepted more than 196 million counterfeit items with an estimated value of EUR 6.3 billion, a volume 67 per cent higher than in 2024 and 29 per cent above the previous record set in 2023. Customs alone detained some 42 million items worth almost EUR 2 billion at the external border. By number of items, recorded media accounted for nearly 30 per cent of seizures and toys for almost one in five, followed by games and consoles, clothing and cigarettes including vaping products. Mainland China, Hong Kong and Türkiye were the most prominent places of provenance. Sea freight remained the largest mode by value, but road overtook it by number of items for the first time, and most customs detention cases involved express courier and postal consignments linked to e-commerce. The report places the figures in the context of the adopted EU customs reform, including the EU Customs Authority and the EU Customs Data Hub.
What it means. The shift of counterfeit detentions towards small parcels is the operational face of the policy changes already in train for low-value e-commerce imports, including the flat EUR 3 customs duty on low-value consignments, the Union handling fee due from 1 November 2026, and the eventual data-sharing obligations on platforms under the recast Union Customs Code. Online marketplaces and express carriers should expect intellectual property enforcement to become a data question rather than a physical inspection question, with the declarant’s records and the platform’s data under scrutiny. Brand owners should keep their customs applications for action current across all 27 Member States, since a detention requires a right-holder to act on it. For administrations outside the EU, the report illustrates how enforcement statistics move when postal and express flows are brought fully inside the risk-management system, and how quickly volumes can rise once they are counted.
WCO releases a standardised rules-of-origin training package built on the AfCFTA rules
World Customs Organization, 20 October 2026. The WCO published a Training Strategy on Rules of Origin and an accompanying intermediate-level training package, developed under the EU-WCO Rules of Origin Africa Programme as that programme concludes. The package comprises a standard agenda for a five-day introductory workshop, a facilitator’s guide with lesson plans, a full slide set, a learner’s pack and gamified training tools, and uses the African Continental Free Trade Area’s general and product-specific rules of origin as its case study. It is aimed at the more than 200 WCO-accredited rules-of-origin trainers prepared under the programme, who in turn train customs officials, other agencies and the private sector. The material is available on the WCO’s CLiKC! learning platform, and the WCO notes that trainers in other regions must align the content with their own national and regional legislation.
What it means. Rules of origin remain the point at which most preferential trade fails in practice, and the shortage is seldom of legal texts but of people who can teach them consistently. A standard, reusable package allows an administration to run origin training in-house, at scale and to a common standard, rather than depending on sporadic donor-funded workshops. Administrations implementing the AfCFTA, and the private-sector associations that train their members, should obtain the package and adapt it to their tariff schedules and the product-specific rules as finalised. Exporters and importers can use the same material to upskill the staff who complete origin declarations and respond to verification requests.
WCO and Ukrainian Customs map corruption risk at process and border-post level
World Customs Organization, 22 October 2026. The WCO reported on a four-day workshop under its Anti-Corruption and Integrity Promotion (A-CIP) Programme with officers of the State Customs Service of Ukraine from the Lviv, Kyiv, Zaporizhzhia and Odesa regions. Participants from the risk-management and corruption-prevention functions mapped customs processes, built corruption risk registers linked to prevention measures drawn from the WCO Revised Arusha Declaration, and tested the method during a field visit to the Krakovets border crossing in the Lviv region. Experts from the Canada Border Services Agency and Swedish Customs contributed. The outputs are process maps and localised risk registers; the stated next steps are for participants to extend the method across regional offices and for the Service to update its national corruption risk assessment using the National Agency on Corruption Prevention methodology.
What it means. The practical point for administrations is the method rather than the country. Integrity programmes that stop at codes of conduct and declarations change little; those that map each process step, identify where discretion and face-to-face contact create exposure, and attach a specific control to each risk, produce something that can be audited and updated. Border posts are the right place to test such registers because the operational reality differs from the headquarters flowchart. Administrations designing or refreshing an integrity strategy should pair the national risk assessment with process-level registers of this kind, and traders should expect that automation, pre-arrival processing and reduced physical contact will increasingly be justified on integrity as well as facilitation grounds.
Viet Nam: amended Customs Law takes effect on 1 March 2027, implementing instruments in draft, new penalty decree already in force
National Assembly of Viet Nam, Law No. 11/2026/QH16, adopted 23 August 2026. The Law Amending and Supplementing a Number of Articles of the Customs Law was adopted at the first extraordinary session of the sixteenth National Assembly and takes effect on 1 March 2027; the National Assembly Office has since issued a consolidated text of the Customs Law on the Government portal showing the amended provisions. The amendments redefine the national single window so that declarants submit information and documents as data messages, require customs to apply risk management using digital technology, big data and artificial intelligence, introduce compliance management with priority processing for compliant declarants, bring goods traded through e-commerce platforms within customs procedures and require platform operators to connect to the customs e-commerce data system, allow post-clearance audit for up to five years with each audit limited to 20 days extendable once, and empower customs to suspend clearance of suspected counterfeit goods on its own initiative. A draft decree and a draft circular to implement the law, replacing Decree 08/2015 and Circular 38/2015 as amended, were released for public consultation in September. Separately, Decree No. 169/2026/ND-CP of 15 May 2026 on penalties for administrative violations in customs is already in force, with fines of up to VND 80 million for use of forged or unlawful documents and tax-evasion penalties scaled from one to three times the tax evaded according to aggravating factors.
What it means. Businesses importing into or exporting from Viet Nam are facing two reforms on two timelines and should not conflate them. The penalty decree applies now and reshapes exposure for late filings, documentary errors and under-declaration, so compliance teams and brokers should review it immediately. The amended law and its implementing instruments govern the substantive procedures from March 2027, and the consultation on the draft decree and circular is the moment to raise practical concerns about data submission, e-commerce platform connectivity and audit timelines. The compliance-management provisions reward traders with a clean record, which makes the next twelve months the period in which to build that record. For other administrations, the Vietnamese text is a current example of a customs law rewritten around data, platform obligations and risk-based audit rather than paper and physical inspection.
Trade & Customs Watch is compiled from primary sources: HMRC, the Department for Business and Trade, the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Taxation and Customs Union, the World Customs Organization and national customs administrations. Items are summarised; the linked record is authoritative. Commentary is our own and is general in nature, not advice on any particular transaction. To discuss what any of these developments means for your business or administration, contact us.