The Commission’s 44th annual trade defence report, now with the Council and Parliament, records 232 measures in force, 32 fresh investigations and a litigation docket that nearly doubled in a year
BRUSSELS, 21 September 2026 | Peacock Tariff Consulting Trade Desk
The European Union entered 2026 with 232 trade defence measures in force, up from 199 twelve months earlier, according to the European Commission’s 44th annual report on anti-dumping, anti-subsidy and safeguard activities, a document dated 17 September and transmitted to the Council as 13332/26 before being publicised at the start of this week.
The report is a statutory stocktake rather than a policy announcement, and it is easy to underrate for that reason. But it is the single most reliable annual picture of how aggressively Brussels is policing its border, where the pressure is concentrated by sector, and how much of the world’s own trade defence apparatus is now pointed back at European exporters. For anyone shipping into or out of the single market, it is the closest thing to a scorecard.
The headline numbers point in one direction. Measures in force rose by 33 over the year. Thirty-two new investigations were initiated in 2025, a figure the Commission describes as just below the record set in 2024. Of the 232 measures standing at year-end, 220 were definitive. And the Commission puts the employment covered by those measures at more than 637,000 direct manufacturing jobs.
The shape of the year
Breaking the 2025 activity apart, the Commission imposed 26 definitive measures during the year and applied provisional anti-dumping duties in 27 cases. It imposed no provisional anti-subsidy measures at all, a notable absence given how prominently the subsidy instrument has featured in European policy rhetoric. Duties were applied retroactively in three cases, an enforcement tool used where importers have stockpiled ahead of an expected measure.
The sectoral concentration is pronounced and it is not evenly distributed between the stock of measures and the flow of new cases.
Iron and steel accounts for almost a third of measures in force. That is the legacy of two decades of trade defence activity against a sector that combines global overcapacity, low value density and high political salience in producing member states. It is a stock figure, built up over many years.
Chemicals is the story of the flow. The sector accounts for almost a quarter of measures in force, but it represented over a third of new investigations initiated during 2025. The direction of travel is unambiguous. European chemicals producers, squeezed between energy costs that remain structurally above those of competitors in the Gulf, the United States and Asia, and a wave of new capacity coming online in China, have turned to the trade defence instrument at a rate that outpaces every other sector.
Any importer of bulk or specialty chemicals into the EU should read that single statistic as a forward indicator. The cases initiated in 2025 are the definitive measures of 2026 and 2027.
The traffic going the other way
The report’s second half, and the part most often skipped, covers trade defence measures imposed by third countries against EU exports. Here the numbers are equally instructive.
At the end of 2025 there were 181 third-country trade defence measures in force against EU exports, an increase of 14 over the year. Against that, new third-country investigations targeting the EU fell from 34 in 2024 to 30 in 2025.
The two figures together describe a plateau rather than an escalation. The stock is still rising because measures imposed in previous years remain in force and expiry reviews tend to extend them, but the flow of new cases has edged down. That is a more benign reading than the general tenor of trade commentary in 2026 would suggest.
The report also records a concrete win for European exporters: Australia closed its long-running anti-dumping and anti-subsidy investigations targeting Italian tomato exports. Cases of that kind rarely generate headlines outside the affected sector, but they are precisely what the Commission’s market access work is designed to produce, and the report presents the outcome as evidence that defending EU exporters abroad is as much a part of the trade defence function as protecting producers at home.
The courts arrive
The most striking movement in the report is not in duty rates. It is in litigation.
Eighteen new court challenges to EU trade defence measures were lodged in 2025, up from ten in 2024. Six of those eighteen were brought against the countervailing duties imposed in 2024 on battery electric vehicles from China.
That clustering is the point. The EV case was the largest and most politically charged anti-subsidy action the Commission has ever taken, and it was always likely to be tested exhaustively before the General Court. Six separate challenges in a single year against a single set of measures is an indication of both the commercial stakes and the willingness of affected exporters to spend on litigation.
The Commission’s record in defending its measures remains strong. Of eight General Court rulings handed down in 2025, it won seven. A judicial success rate of that order is what allows Brussels to keep imposing measures with confidence, and it is one reason exporters who intend to challenge are increasingly focused on the investigation stage, where the factual record is built, rather than on appeal.
The report also records that the Commission has put in place a new exporter reporting and consignment tracking tool, effective from the start of 2026, to monitor the price undertaking accepted in the battery electric vehicle case. Price undertakings, in which an exporter agrees to sell above a minimum price instead of paying duty, are only as good as the monitoring behind them. The creation of a dedicated tracking instrument suggests the Commission intends this one to hold.
Circumvention and the Malaysia case
One anti-circumvention case in 2025 extended anti-dumping measures on monosodium glutamate from China to imports from Malaysia.
Small in value, large in signal. Anti-circumvention proceedings are how an authority responds when duties on one origin are followed by a sudden appearance of the same product from a neighbouring country with no obvious production base. The remedy is to extend the existing measure to the new origin, which is faster and evidentially lighter than running a fresh investigation.
For importers, the lesson is that a shift in sourcing country following the imposition of duties is now a monitored event rather than an unnoticed one. Purchasing patterns that change abruptly after a measure is imposed draw attention, and the extension of duty can be applied to goods already registered at the frontier.
This is the same logic that produced the melt-and-pour origin requirement in the EU’s replacement steel safeguard from 1 July 2026, and the same logic visible in this month’s grain-oriented electrical steel safeguard, which captured cores already incorporated inside imported transformers rather than waiting for assembly offshore to become the circumvention route.
Read together, these three developments describe a coherent enforcement philosophy: define the measure by the substance being protected, not by the customs description of the thing crossing the border.
Safeguards move into the frame
The report also captures the growing role of safeguards, an instrument the EU historically used sparingly.
Safeguard measures on certain ferro-alloys were imposed on 18 November 2025. The functioning of the steel safeguard was adjusted on 25 March 2025, a tightening that preceded the wholesale replacement of the regime later in the year.
Safeguards differ from anti-dumping and anti-subsidy measures in a way that matters commercially. They do not require a finding of unfair pricing or of subsidisation by an exporting government. They require a finding of increased imports causing or threatening serious injury, and they apply to all origins rather than to a named country. For an exporter, that means there is no defence based on your own pricing conduct. If the aggregate import trend triggers the measure, you are inside it regardless of how you have behaved.
The EU has now used the safeguard instrument for steel broadly, for ferro-alloys and, this month, for grain-oriented electrical steel. The pattern suggests Brussels has become comfortable with an instrument it once treated as exceptional.
What 637,000 jobs actually measures
The employment figure attached to the measures deserves a moment of scrutiny, because it is the number most likely to be quoted out of context.
The Commission states that the 232 measures in force protect more than 637,000 direct manufacturing jobs. That is a count of employment in the European industries that petitioned for and benefit from the measures. It is not a count of jobs that would disappear without them, and it does not net off employment in downstream industries that pay more for protected inputs.
Trade economists have argued about this asymmetry for as long as trade remedies have existed. The benefits of a measure are concentrated in an identifiable industry with a trade association and a lobbying budget. The costs are dispersed across downstream users and, eventually, consumers, none of whom can readily identify the measure as the cause of the price they pay. That asymmetry is structural and it shapes which cases get brought.
The Commission’s own procedures acknowledge it through the Union interest test, which requires an assessment of whether measures would be against the broader interest of the European Union, taking account of users, importers and consumers as well as producers. In practice the test rarely defeats a measure, but it does shape remedy design, and the price undertaking in the battery electric vehicle case and the price threshold architecture used in recent safeguards are both examples of instruments chosen to blunt downstream cost impact.
For businesses, the practical reading is that the 637,000 figure tells you how politically entrenched the trade defence apparatus is, not how economically efficient it is. Both are useful to know, and only the first is a reliable guide to what happens next.
Expiry reviews: the quiet extension machine
One mechanism does more than any other to explain how a stock of 232 measures accumulates, and it barely features in public discussion.
Anti-dumping and anti-subsidy measures in the European Union are imposed for five years. Before that period expires, the domestic industry may request an expiry review, and where it does, the measure remains in force while the review is conducted. The legal question in an expiry review is not whether dumping and injury exist now, but whether they would be likely to recur if the measure were removed.
That is a materially easier test to satisfy than the original one. Global overcapacity in a sector, unused production capacity in the exporting country and the existence of trade barriers in third markets are all routinely accepted as evidence that dumping would resume. The practical effect is that measures, once imposed, tend to persist through multiple five-year cycles.
The report’s stock figures reflect that dynamic. A net increase of 33 measures in a year, in a year with 32 new initiations and 26 definitive impositions, implies very few measures dropping out. Expiry is not the natural end of an EU trade remedy. It is a scheduled opportunity to renew it.
For importers, the planning implication is to treat any measure affecting your supply chain as effectively permanent unless you have specific reason to believe otherwise, and to participate in expiry reviews if you have evidence that conditions have genuinely changed. Importer and user submissions in expiry reviews are comparatively rare, which means they carry weight when they arrive with data behind them.
The political frame
The report quotes the political commitment underpinning the activity, citing the pledge from the 2025 State of the Union address that the EU will always protect its industry from unfair competition.
That line is worth parsing carefully, because it contains a conditional. The commitment is to protect against unfair competition, not against competition. Every measure in the 232 rests on a legal finding of dumping, subsidisation or an import surge causing injury, and each is reviewable by the General Court, as the litigation numbers demonstrate.
Still, the direction is clear enough. A stock of measures that grew by 17 percent in a year, an investigation rate at near-record levels, an expanding safeguard practice and an anti-circumvention posture that follows products through third countries and into finished goods together describe a border that is being policed more actively than at any point in the recent past.
What it means for importers
For businesses bringing goods into the EU, the report supports four practical conclusions.
Sector risk is quantifiable and unevenly distributed. If you import chemicals, the probability that a product in your portfolio becomes subject to a new investigation is now materially higher than for most other sectors, because chemicals generated over a third of 2025 initiations while holding under a quarter of the existing measures. If you import iron and steel products, your exposure is more likely to come from an existing measure being extended at expiry review than from a new case.
Sourcing changes are visible. The monosodium glutamate extension to Malaysia is a reminder that switching origin after a duty is imposed is the single clearest trigger for an anti-circumvention proceeding. Where a genuine production base exists in the new origin, that can be demonstrated. Where it does not, the duty follows.
Registration is a live risk. Duties were applied retroactively in three cases during 2025. Where the Commission instructs customs authorities to register imports during an investigation, any definitive duty can reach back to the registration date. Building inventory ahead of an expected measure is therefore not the hedge it appears to be.
Litigation is worth considering but the odds are known. The Commission won seven of eight General Court rulings in 2025. Challenges succeed, but rarely, and the more productive intervention is almost always participation in the investigation itself, where questionnaire responses, verification visits and injury submissions shape the record the court will later review.
For exporters into the EU
The mirror-image advice is straightforward. Cooperation in an investigation produces materially better outcomes than non-cooperation. Across EU practice, exporters who file complete questionnaire responses and accept verification typically receive individual duty rates, while those who do not are assigned the residual rate, which is calculated on the facts available and is almost always higher.
The price undertaking route also remains open, as the battery electric vehicle case shows, though the new consignment tracking tool effective from the start of 2026 makes clear that an undertaking now comes with ongoing reporting obligations rather than a one-off commitment.
For EU exporters abroad
The 181 third-country measures in force against EU exports deserve more attention than they usually receive. European exporters are defendants in other jurisdictions’ proceedings roughly as often as third-country exporters are defendants in Brussels.
The practical implication is symmetrical. An EU manufacturer that receives a questionnaire from a foreign investigating authority faces exactly the same choice architecture, and the same consequences for non-cooperation, as a Chinese or Indian exporter receiving one from the Commission. The Australian tomato outcome shows that engagement, backed by Commission support through the market access channel, can produce termination rather than duty.
Where the next cases come from
Reading the report as a forward indicator rather than a historical record produces three reasonably confident predictions.
Chemicals will dominate the 2026 and 2027 initiation lists. A sector that produced over a third of new investigations while holding under a quarter of existing measures is a sector where the caseload is still building. European producers of base chemicals, intermediates, polymers and specialty products are operating against an energy cost structure that will not improve quickly and against capacity additions in Asia and the Middle East that are already commissioned. The trade defence instrument is the only lever available to them on a timescale that matters.
Green transition inputs will follow. The pattern established by the battery electric vehicle countervailing duties, and extended this month by the grain-oriented electrical steel safeguard, is that products essential to European electrification are also products where European capacity is thin and Asian capacity is abundant. Solar components, battery cells and materials, wind turbine components, heat pump parts, grid equipment and electrolysers all sit in that intersection. Each combines a strategic autonomy argument with an industrial injury argument, which is the most persuasive combination available to a European petitioner.
Downstream scope extensions will become normal. The monosodium glutamate extension to Malaysia, the melt and pour rule in the steel safeguard and the capture of cores inside finished transformers are three instances of the same enforcement instinct within twelve months. Importers whose supply chains rely on processing a measured input into an unmeasured finished good outside the European Union should assume that gap will eventually close.
The road ahead
The 2026 report, when it appears next September, will capture a year in which the replacement steel safeguard, the CBAM definitive regime and a chemicals caseload initiated in 2025 all became operational simultaneously. It is reasonable to expect the stock of measures to rise again.
For now, the working assumption for anyone trading with Europe should be that the 232 figure is a floor rather than a ceiling, that chemicals is the sector to watch, and that the Commission’s willingness to extend measures across origins and into downstream goods has become settled practice rather than an experiment.