The Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) released on 14 May 2020 a Policy Brief which provides a preliminary analysis, from an African perspective, of the limits of international trade law in times of crisis, and offers policy recommendations for African policy makers to consider. Following a brief analysis of the law of international trade as it applies to the movement of Covid-19-essential goods, the brief concludes that, in times of real emergency such as now, the role of law in assuring access to essential medical supplies on the international market is highly diminished. An example is the export ban of protective equipment and life-saving medical supplies (such as face masks and respirators) recently adopted by Germany also towards the other EU countries, a measure that clearly contradicts the principle of free movement of goods within the EU, one of the main pillars of the EU single market, as highlighted in Article 3(3)(g) and Article 4 of the EC Treaty.

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As part of the BACUDA (Band of Customs Data Analysts) project, the World Customs Organisation (WCO) has developed a neural network model called “Dual-Attentive-Tree-aware-Embedded" (DATE) to assist Customs administrations in better detecting fraud-risky transactions. 

The WCO BACUDA project was launched in September 2019 as a collaborative research platform focused on data analytics. Nigeria Customs are implementing a pilot test to verify its performance at the Tin Can (in Lagos) and Onne (in Port-Harcourt) seaports. The model uses an Artificial Intelligence (AI) module called “ATTENTION” that can detect potential fraudulent transactions more accurately than the other traditional machine learning models, and using less data (such as XGBoost/eXtreme Gradient Boosting, a machine learning model used by many organisations, like insurances, for identifying fraudulent claims by aggregating and analysing historical data on their clients).

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