US Unveils New Tariffs on 60 Trade Partners, Including Pakistan, Over Forced Labour Concerns

The United States has announced new tariffs on 60 trading partners, including Pakistan, India and China, framing the measure as a response to forced labour concerns in global supply chains rather than the broader tariff disputes that have dominated trade headlines this year.

Who is affected and by how much

Pakistan is among a large group of countries, alongside Bangladesh, Britain, Cambodia, Canada, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Malaysia, Mexico, Sri Lanka and Trinidad and Tobago, facing a flat 10 percent tariff rate under the new measure. China faces a steeper 12.5 percent rate alongside 36 other countries, while the European Union, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and Switzerland face combined rates in the 10 to 12.5 percent range depending on the specific product categories involved.

The stated justification

US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer framed the measure around a long-standing American policy rather than a new trade weapon, noting that "the United States has had a forced labor import ban for nearly a century" and arguing that trading partners should be enforcing comparable protections of their own. That framing positions the tariffs as an extension of existing US law on forced labour in supply chains rather than a fresh punitive trade action, giving the administration a legal and rhetorical basis distinct from the broader tariff measures that courts have previously challenged.

Why the legal framing matters

The timing and structure of these tariffs is not incidental. They arrive as a replacement for an expiring 10 percent baseline duty Trump had announced earlier, and follow a months-long investigation specifically built around forced labour concerns. That distinction matters because the Supreme Court struck down a separate set of Trump tariff actions in February on legal grounds, and framing this round of tariffs around forced labour enforcement, an area with a much longer legislative history in US trade law, is widely seen as a more legally defensible foundation than the broad executive tariff powers the Court rejected earlier in the year.

What it means for Pakistan specifically

For Pakistan, a 10 percent tariff lands in the same bracket as several other South and Southeast Asian exporters, including Bangladesh, India and Sri Lanka, key competitors in categories like textiles and apparel where forced labour concerns have historically drawn the most international scrutiny. A uniform rate across regional competitors limits the relative disadvantage compared to a scenario where Pakistan alone faced a steeper tariff, but it still represents an added cost pressure on exporters already navigating a difficult global demand environment.

The broader trade landscape this fits into

This measure lands amid a year already defined by an unusually high volume of US tariff actions, court challenges, and legal recalibrations, with the administration repeatedly having to find new legal footings for trade measures after earlier ones were struck down. Building this round specifically around forced labour law, rather than the emergency economic powers used in earlier tariff rounds, suggests the administration has learned from its February setback and is now favoring narrower, more legally grounded justifications even when the practical effect, added tariffs on a long list of trading partners, looks similar on the surface.

Whether this proves more durable against legal challenge than its predecessor will likely become clearer only if affected trading partners or importers choose to contest it in court, but for now, exporters across 60 countries are left absorbing a new cost structure justified on human rights grounds rather than the more familiar language of trade imbalances or national security.