Strong & Herd LLP Blog - Import / Export Services: Inside the World Customs Organisation (WCO) (10) On the town sampling Brussels Beer – and learning about Rules of Origin (or ROO as we call it)

Thursday 11 July 2013

Inside the World Customs Organisation (WCO) (10) On the town sampling Brussels Beer – and learning about Rules of Origin (or ROO as we call it)

I was disappointed – I wanted to get the WCO take on non-preference rules of origin but don’t think that’s going to happen. Strange they just seem to think it is irrelevant – odd as the WTO have been trying to negotiate standard non-preference rules of origin for about 15 years. OK, maybe that’s why they aren’t covering it. So it’s preference origin and Regional Trade Agreement, things I deal with every day – but I’m always ready to learn something different about it and I did learn about the drafting process for RTAs which was interesting. More preference ROO tomorrow and probably more photographs – it’ll be strange everyone going home. And we’ll get our Certificates! Yeah, certified at last!

Leonardo, the WCO Technical Advisor on Valuation organised a beer sampling trip after the training. It was great – don’t like all the beer, some are too fruity and fizzy for me, but fun to taste them. Then a smaller group of us went to watch the ladies’ football. So 6 of us (2 Danes, 2 Swedes, 1 Portuguese and me) sitting in an Irish pub in Brussels watching Denmark and Sweden play football – it was a 1:1 draw so no fighting. The annoying thing is our Brazilian friends said it’d be 1:1 – you don’t know how annoying that is! Anyway, if you wonder how they serve beer in Brussels, check out the pictures.