Entity List - EAR Change & Rights-Based Additions

Commerce has added eleven entities to the Entity List under the destinations of Burma, China, Nicaragua, and Russia. In this rule, BIS also amends the EAR to explicitly confirm that the foreign policy interest of protecting human rights worldwide is a basis for adding entities to the Entity List.

Additions include two Russian and three Burmese firms that procure and service military equipment enabling Burma’s military regime to carry out human rights abuses, as well as brutal aerial attacks that have killed and injured civilians.

The Nicaraguan National Police (NNP) is added because the NNP is responsible for or complicit in, or has directly or indirectly engaged in, serious human rights abuses in Nicaragua

Five entities have been implicated in human rights violations and abuses in the implementation of China’s campaign of repression, mass arbitrary detention and high-technology surveillance against the Uyghur people and members of other Muslim minority groups in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.  Reuters reports that four of the named companies are subsidiaries of the Chinese surveillance camera maker Hikvision, which has been on the blacklist since 2021.

EAR Amendment

In this rule BIS amends the “Criteria for revising the Entity List” introductory text and the “is informed” provisions of § 744.11 to explicitly confirm a longstanding position that the protection of human rights throughout the world is a foreign policy interest considered in assessing whether the activities of an entity – and those acting on behalf of such entity are contrary to the national security or foreign policy of the United States.

This amendment is consistent with the recent decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in Changji Esquel Textile Co. Ltd. v. Raimondo, 40 F.4th 716 (2022), which affirmed BIS’s authority to add parties to the Entity List for human rights-related reasons. [FR 2023-06663]