US BIS expands Iran and Russia/Belarus Foreign Direct Product rules to cover Common High Priority List after April 13 Iranian attack on Israel

Mechanism

The rule operates on two FDP perimeters in parallel:

1. Iran FDP rule (15 CFR 734.9 / 746.7) — extends EAR jurisdiction to foreign-produced items destined for Iran where those items are derived from US-origin technology, software, or made by plants that are themselves direct products of US-origin equipment. The April 18 rule expands the product scope to bring in the CHPL items. 2. Russia/Belarus/Temporarily occupied Crimea FDP rule (15 CFR 734.9(f)) — the same CHPL scope expansion applies to this perimeter, matching the Iran controls so that diversion-via-Russia or diversion-via-Belarus routes are equally covered.

The Common High Priority List (CHPL) was developed by the US in coordination with the European Union, Japan and the United Kingdom in late 2023 to identify, by Harmonised Tariff Schedule 6-digit codes, the items most commonly recovered from Russian weapons systems on the Ukrainian battlefield. Categories include:

• Integrated circuits (a wide range of ECCN 3A001 / EAR99 commercial

parts previously not subject to Russia/Iran controls in their foreign-produced form).

• Radio-frequency transceiver modules.
• Items essential for the manufacture and testing of electronic

components (e.g., wafer-probing equipment, oscilloscopes, signal analysers).

• Computer numerically controlled (CNC) machine tools.

By pulling all CHPL HTS-6 codes into the FDP perimeters, BIS makes foreign-made versions of these commercial-grade microelectronics subject to the EAR — closing the gap that previously allowed non-US-origin chip shipments to flow into Iran (and into Russian weapons supply chains via Iran or Belarus) without triggering US licensing jurisdiction.

The rule is a direct response to the 13 April 2024 Iranian drone / missile attack on Israel and complements parallel OFAC SDN designations on Iranian UAV producers issued the same day. It was published in tandem with the BIS rule on Russia/Belarus medical-device License Exception MED (already filed, 2024-04-29) — together these two April 2024 BIS rules represent the post-13-April Iran/Russia EAR package.

Downstream implications

• Severity 4: the CHPL expansion pulls a large volume of commercial-grade

semiconductors and electronics manufacturing equipment into the EAR perimeter for Iran and Russia/Belarus, materially raising the legal exposure of EU, Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese chip distributors who previously relied on the EAR99 / foreign-produced-item safe harbour.

• Sets the legal template that BIS extended three months later via the

No Technology for Terror Act implementation rule (FR Doc 2024-16566, eff. 23 July 2024 — already filed as 2024-07-26-us-bis-iran-fdpr-expansion-no-tech-for-terror-act).

• Aligns the Iran FDP perimeter with the Russia FDP perimeter,

signalling that diversion-through-Iran is now treated as a Russia weapons-supply-chain risk rather than an Iran-only issue.

• Transit grace until 20 May 2024 minimised disruption to in-flight

legitimate trade, consistent with prior BIS rollouts.

Open questions

• What share of CHPL-categorised semiconductor flows to Iran and Russia

was actually US-origin pre-rule? The FDP rule reaches foreign-made items derived from US tech, so the practical bite depends on how pervasive US tech / software / equipment is in third-country chip production lines.

• Will allied jurisdictions (EU, Japan, UK) follow with mirror controls

on the same CHPL HTS-6 set, or will US extraterritorial application remain the primary enforcement lever?