At the request of the Thai Customs Department of the Kingdom of Thailand, the WCO conducted a national workshop on rules of origin and technical update of preferential rules of origin from 13 to 16 December 2022 in Bangkok, Thailand. The workshop, co-facilitated by a WCO expert, an accredited expert and a resource person from Japan Customs, sponsored by the Customs Cooperation Fund-Japan (CCF-Japan), was attended by twenty-one participants from the Thai Customs Department, the Department of Trade Negotiations and the Department of Foreign Trade.

In her opening remarks, Ms. Arpapannee Sangmukda, Director of Human Resource Management Division of the Thai Customs Department emphasized that the enhancement of Customs capacity, requires to review the existing Rules of Origin from various perspectives from time to time. In particular, it would be beneficial to understand the impact of the Harmonized System review cycle on Rules of Origin and to know how to best respond to those changes, in order to ensure efficient and effective collection of revenue. She also noted that the good practices presented during the workshop would provide effective incentives and valuable inputs for the future negotiation of commercial agreements or technical updates of rules of origin.

During the workshop, the facilitators presented various technical and practical issues for correct technical updates of the Product Specific Rules (PSRs), including the WCO Guide to the Technical Update of Preferential Rules of Origin, the Guidelines on Certification of Origin and Preferential Verification of Origin, which have been designed to assist WCO Members in smoothly running origin related procedures and ensuring consistency between the HS latest edition and the preferential rules of origin. In addition, many cases and practical issues were discussed, including the transposition of the PSRs in line with the latest HS edition, certification of origin and verification of origin, as well as related challenges.

The participants expressed their views on the impact of HS amendments on preferential rules of origin and shared their experiences and challenges they face with regard to updating rules of origin based on HS, certification of origin, verification, and advance rulings as well as the continuous process of digitalization of the certificate of origin. They also worked on a series of practical exercises on the technical update of rules of origin and preferential origin verification.