In the light of the events surrounding the Seattle Ministerial in December 1999 and the fate of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, increasing attention is being paid not only to the substance of trade policy but to the processes through which it is effected. Growing realization of the need to enhance transparency and legitimacy in trade policy decision-making is reflected in debates on the openness of the multilateral processes most obviously represented by the World Trade Organization. Somewhat less attention has been paid to ways in which national trade policy processes are adapting to these pressures. The article argues the need to redress the balance and suggests that it is possible to analyse the development of at least some national trade policy environments in terms of a shift from a ‘club’, through an ‘adaptive club’ to a ‘multistakeholder’ model. These are examined with specific reference to the development of the latter in the Canadian and European Union contexts.

This article discusses the issue of the capacity to be a party (legitima persona standi in iudicio) to the dispute settlement proceedings of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and addresses the question whether there is a need stemming from the system of norms in the WTO to involve non-Members, especially non-State actors, as participants in its dispute settlement process.

Proposed tobacco control measures such as mandating plain packaging of products and prohibiting the use of terms such as ‘light’ and ‘mild’ when associated with tobacco products raise the issue of to what degree WTO Members have regulatory freedom in relation to trademarks under the TRIPs Agreement. This paper uses these measures as a case study to examine rules relating to registration and use of trademarks. More particularly, the scope of Article 20 is addressed, as is the issue of whether TRIPs creates a positive right to use a trademark. This paper argues that no right of use is provided for by TRIPs and that Article 20, whilst not prohibiting the measures in question, is not based upon sound principle and is difficult to interpret. Finally, this paper argues that rules relating to use of trademarks require re-negotiation and that a minimum standard of protection for use of trademarks is not justified except where such a standard relates to principles of national treatment or most-favored-nation principles.

In the November 2003 issue of this journal, Alan Sykes describes the WTO Safeguards Agreement (SA) as ‘a mess’ (Sykes, 2003). The author sets out to show that the criteria for using safeguards protection under WTO rules, and Appellate Body (AB) decisions related to dispute settlement cases over such protection, are incoherent. Any use of protection under the SA therefore appears doomed to being struck down in a WTO challenge. The author believes that the AB could rectify this situation in the form of guidelines to make safeguards protection operational, assuming that such protection should be used in the first place.

I thank Professor Jones for his thoughtful commentary on my paper regarding the ‘safeguards mess’ in the November 2003 issue of this Review. I disagree with him on some key points, however, and believe that he has misread my position on others. Accordingly, I am grateful to the editors of the World Trade Review for this opportunity to offer a brief rejoinder.

The short answer to the question posed in the title is for the most part ‘yes’. The negotiators' objectives grew out of their governments' unsatisfactory experiences with GATT dispute settlement and they set out to fix what was wrong with the system. In the Uruguay Round result, WTO Members have established a system that is truly multilateral and at the same time works effectively and efficiently. Today the system is used by developed and developing countries alike and has shown itself capable of resolving extremely difficult and politically sensitive trade disputes. At the end of the Uruguay Round, the results of these negotiations were warmly praised in key capitals around the world, including in Washington. But there is at least one important US objective that, in practice, turned out not to have been met (at least in the way intended) in the Uruguay Round negotiations. Another important objective of many of the negotiators now appears to have backfired to an extent that several WTO Members are seeking to revisit their earlier achievement.

On 16 January 2003, the WTO Appellate Body issued its report on United States – Continued Dumping And Subsidy Offset Act Of 2000 (WTO Doc. WT/DS217 and 234/AB/R). In this report, the Appellate Body condemned the so-called US Byrd Amendment by finding that it was inconsistent with the US obligations under the WTO Agreements on Antidumping (AD) and Subsidies and Countervailing Measures (SCM).

Some cases attain ‘landmark’ status because they constitute a jurisprudential paradigm shift. Others attain such status because in them a decisor, usually a supreme jurisdiction, renders a definitive, ‘canonical’, ruling. Sometimes it is both reasons. Sometimes, rarely, it is neither. EC–Asbestos is such a rare case. It may well qualify as a landmark. It has, justifiably, attracted huge attention and, understandably, considerable controversy. Its reasoning, however, is so decidedly non-definitive that it is not, consequently, possible to say whether it represents a veritable paradigm shift or is just a badly reasoned case by the Appellate Body (AB), albeit with a non-controversial result.