Introduction

The Scandinavian sagas of the early Middle Ages portrayed Iceland as a state without central coercive authority where judgements or awards were often enforced through mediation and, ultimately, the taking of hostages. In this respect, today's WTO community still very much looks like Iceland ten centuries ago. There is no ‘WTO police’ to send trade ministers to jail if they do not comply with recommendations and rulings of the Dispute Settlement Body (DSB), the political entity supervising the WTO dispute settlement system.

From the point of view of international law, the WTO Understanding on Rules and Procedures Governing the Settlement of Disputes (the Dispute Settlement Understanding or DSU, as it is more commonly known) provides for a unique system of dispute resolution. However, as sophisticated as it may be on other accounts, the system still relies on a conceptually primitive mechanism of countermeasures when it comes to securing compliance by a reluctant Member found in violation of its WTO obligations. Under such mechanism, if a WTO Member does not comply with DSB rulings, the Member that brought the complaint (and nobody else) may suspend the application of certain of its own WTO obligations so as to limit access to its market for products or services from the Member found in breach.

The purpose of this contribution is not to provide an exhaustive analysis of the ‘countermeasure’ mechanism under the dispute settlement system set up by the Marrakesh Agreement establishing the World Trade Organization (WTO Agreement).