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Introduction: Anatomy of the WTO Impasse

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 March 2019

Kathleen Claussen
Kathleen Claussen*
Affiliation:
Associate Professor, University of Miami School of Law.
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Extract

With the creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995, major changes were made to the dispute settlement system that had previously governed international trade disputes. Prior to the WTO, the dispute settlement system that had evolved under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) was widely believed to suffer from certain structural weaknesses. One perceived weakness was that the establishment of a dispute settlement panel or the adoption of a panel's report required a positive consensus of all the GATT contracting parties, effectively allowing respondents to block losing outcomes against themselves. Thus, one major change that resulted from the Uruguay Round of negotiations (which led to the creation of the WTO) was the replacement of the positive consensus rule with a negative consensus rule such that to block establishment of a panel or adoption of a panel report, all WTO members have to agree not to establish or not to adopt the report.

Type
Revisiting the Multilateral Trading System
Information
Proceedings of the ASIL Annual Meeting , Volume 112 , 2018 , pp. 315 - 316
Copyright
Copyright © by The American Society of International Law 2019 

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Footnotes

This panel was convened at 9:00 a.m., Saturday, April 7, 2018, by its moderator Hugo Perezcano Díaz of the Centre for International Governance Innovation, who introduced the panelists: Jennifer Hillman, of the Georgetown University Law Center; Richard Steinberg, of the UCLA School of Law; Terence P. Stewart, of Stewart & Stewart; and Rufus Yerxa, of the national Foreign Trade Council.