Improving Customs Transit Systems
In the Islamic Countries
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Box 2: First TIR transport from Europe to China
The first TIR transport between Europe and China was successfully completed in February 2019.
The route started from Germany to Khorgos, a major Chinese overland Belt after a 7,400 km
journey in just 12 days without disruption or customs issues. This is opening a new era of door-
to-door TIR operations between China and Europe 18.
1.7 Efficient CTR
One of the most important parts in the development of efficient CTR is to enable the appropriate
level of facilitation while goods transited through transit countries. The most significant barriers
in the smooth flow of transit goods are administrative and procedural barriers. For example, the
level of transparency, access to information about transit procedures, ineffective (or non-
existent) coordination among national and international stakeholders, complicated transit
procedures, lack of coordination on a regional level between neighboring countries, lack of an
appropriate ICT transit system, etc., are only a part of the specific barriers to smooth transit of
goods.
An efficient CTR will need to ensure that the physical movements of the goods, information
flows, and guarantee data are synchronized, so upon finishing the transit procedure, the
discharge of the guarantee will not be delayed.
The legal framework is one of the first prerequisites for an efficient CTR. The efficiency of the
transit regime is based on a higher level of regionalization between countries. Therefore, it is
necessary to have bilateral and regional agreements and implementation of the
recommendations from international agreements and conventions in the national legislation.
Worldwide – or at least multilateral – agreements are preferred to the regional, while those are
more useful than bilateral and corridor agreements. To date, the TIR Convention with 76
participating countries comes closest to this ideal.
Bilateral agreement examples include Afghanistan-Pakistan Agreement for cargoes from
Pakistan seaports shipped to Afghanistan and further to Central Asian countries, as well as
Afghan exports to India, transiting via Pakistan.
Another facilitation method is pre-arrival inspection, whereby Customs is pre-positioned in a
foreign seaport and checks the cargo exported to its country (or transiting through it); this
enables cargo to be pre-cleared and not checked at Road or Rail BCPs. The US Customs has a
number of bilateral agreements, and its officers are located and operational in a number of
seaports and airports. Historically, another example was the case of imports to the Kingdom of
Yugoslavia in the special free zone in the Greek port of Thessaloniki.
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