A significant piece of legislation was the Export Control Act of 1940 which inter alia aimed to restrict shipments of material to pre-war Japan.
In the United Kingdom, the Import, Export and Customs Power (Defence) Act of 1939 was the main legislation prior to World War II.
[3] Post WWII, the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls (CoCom) was founded in 1948,[4] and continued until 1994.
This could include: The end user of the goods or some broker will typically be declared, and similar restrictions apply as to countries.
These include BAFA (The Federal Office of Economics and Export Control) in Germany,[15] BIS (and E2C2) in US, ECJU in UK.
During the development of the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird supersonic spy plane, the US used 'Third-world countries and bogus operations' in order to obtain sufficient ore to create the titanium for the aircraft[16] These are known as Multilateral export control regimes The regimes mean that supporting nations will tend to have similar classifications in their individual legislation.
[20] On October 7, 2022, the U.S. Department of Commerce announced a major set of export control policy changes toward China, with a focus on Artificial Intelligence and semiconductor technologies.
[21] In January 2023, these export controls were expanded multilaterally in an agreement between the United States, the Netherlands, and Japan.
[22][23] In December 2024, the United States further expanded its export controls to include sales of memory chips.
Competent authorities in each EU member state provide the licensing service, e.g. BAFA in Germany, SBDU in France and UAMA in Italy.
There is the similar-sounding Export Control Act of 2002 which grants powers to the Secretary of State to impose such rules and this still applies.
[32] It is administered by the Export Control Joint Unit (ECJU), part of the Department for Business and Trade,[33] with a web-based administration system SPIRE.
[37] It is recommended that companies involved in exports nominate staff, conduct training, keep records, perform internal audits and commit to compliance.