Most exporters meet this mechanism from one end only, and they meet it badly. Either they discover, after years of copies circulating in Europe, that customs would have blocked them on request and nobody ever filed the request. Or they receive a letter saying a consignment has been detained at a port they have shipped through for years, with a deadline to respond and a vocabulary nobody in the company recognises. It is the same procedure, seen from the side you happen to be standing on. Knowing it from both ends is not a legal refinement. It decides whether your brand can be defended in Europe at all, and whether a consignment stopped on a stranger's application comes back to you or is destroyed.
How does a right holder get customs to block copies?
By filing an application for customs action. The holder of a registered right — a trade mark, a design, a patent, a copyright — applies to the customs administration, states the right, describes the genuine product and the features that distinguish it from copies, names a contact reachable at short notice, and undertakes to bear certain costs and liabilities. Once granted, the application circulates in the customs system and the goods it describes are flagged for attention at the frontier. Nothing happens without it: customs does not go looking for infringements of rights nobody has told it about.
- The right has to be registered, and registered here. A trade mark filed only in China protects nothing at a European port. The application rests on a right valid in the Union, or in the Member States concerned, and that registration is the first expense, long before any enforcement.
- The description is what makes it work. Customs officers compare what is in the container with what the application describes. Photographs, packaging details, codes, markings, the names of authorised importers: a vague application produces vague results, and a precise one produces detentions.
- Someone has to answer, fast. When a consignment is detained, the holder is contacted and must confirm whether the goods infringe, within a short period. A contact who is on holiday, or in a time zone nobody thought about, releases the goods by inaction.
- It is renewed, and it is national in its reach. The application has a validity that has to be renewed, and it is filed for the Member States where you want it to apply. An application covering one country leaves the others open, which is precisely how a determined counterfeiter changes port.
What happens when the detained container is yours
The goods are not seized; they are detained. Customs suspends release, immobilises the consignment, and notifies both the declarant or holder of the goods and the right holder who filed the application. You receive a letter identifying the consignment, the right invoked, and the party invoking it — and giving you a short period to react. The container sits where it is, accruing storage, while the question is decided. Nothing about this is a court judgment: it is a precautionary measure taken on a suspicion, and it can be entirely wrong. Which also means nobody will come and establish the facts for you. The administration holds the goods and waits, the right holder states its position, and the only party whose silence carries a legal effect is you.
And it often is, for reasons that have nothing to do with counterfeiting. The applicant is sometimes a former distributor who registered the brand in its own name while it held the territory, and who now uses that registration against the manufacturer whose product it is. Sometimes it is a competitor who filed a design or a trade mark in the Union before you did, which in a first-to-file system makes them the holder of the European right whatever the history in China. Sometimes it is a genuine right and a genuine overlap, discovered at the worst possible moment.
The simplified destruction procedure, and the silence that triggers it
This is the part that has to be understood before the letter arrives. European rules provide a simplified route: if the right holder confirms the infringement and the declarant or holder of the goods agrees to destruction — or does not reply within the period given — the goods can be destroyed under customs supervision, with no court decision and no finding on the merits. Failing to answer counts as agreement. A letter addressed to a company that receives it in a language nobody reads, or routes it to a department that files it, destroys the cargo as surely as a confession would. The remedy is organisational before it is legal: an address that receives official mail, a person who opens it, and a standing instruction that anything from a customs administration reaches counsel the same day.
What to do immediately if the detention is unfounded
- Oppose the destruction, in writing, within the period. Before anything else, before the facts are even established internally. This single act preserves everything: it takes the simplified route off the table and obliges the right holder to bring proceedings if it wants to go further.
- Find out who the applicant is, and what right it registered. The notification names it. European registers are public and searchable, and what you find there — a mark registered by a former partner, a design filed shortly before your launch — usually explains the whole detention.
- Appoint local counsel in the Member State of detention. The procedure happens there, in that language, before that administration and those courts. A lawyer in another country, however capable, cannot act in the file, and the periods do not pause while you look for one.
- Assemble your own evidence of right and of use. Your registrations, your earlier use, your development files with dates, the contracts with the party now opposing you. Where a former distributor registered your brand, the contract and the correspondence are the heart of the case.
- Deal with the cargo as a separate problem. Storage runs, the customer is waiting, and the season may be lost whatever the legal outcome. Decide early whether to seek release against a guarantee, re-route the consignment, or supply the customer from elsewhere — and tell the customer before it calls you.
Take this subject from both ends on the same afternoon. Search the European trade mark and design registers for your own brand, your product names and your distinctive shapes, and see whose name comes up: if it is a former distributor or a competitor, you have a problem that gets harder every month you leave it. Then, for the rights you do hold in the Union, file the application for customs action and name a contact who is actually reachable within a working day, in a European time zone. Both tasks are cheap now and unaffordable once a container is standing still.
Where to read it yourself
Official pages, opened and checked on 15 October 2026. Where a rule changes, these are the addresses that change with it — this article does not.