WTO Dispute Settlement Body

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US – Origin Marking Requirement: Did the WTO Panel Get the Balance Right between Trade Security and National Security?

January 25, 2023

On 21 December 2022, the WTO Dispute Settlement Panel ruled against the United States (US) on the product labeling requirement for all goods from Hong Kong to be marked “China” as their country of origin. This requirement came from the executive order that then US President Donald Trump signed on 14 July 2020 by suspending the application Section 201(a) of the United States-Hong Kong Policy Act of 1992 (which affirmed the continued application of US laws with respect to Hong Kong) to the customs statute (19 USC §1304), among other things. The product labeling requirement was adopted in response to China’s decision to undermine Hong Kong’s autonomy by enacting the National Security Law. In light of this development, the US Government formed the view that Hong Kong was no longer sufficiently autonomous to justify different treatment from the People’s Republic of China. The Panel found that the US origin marking requirement was discriminatory against Hong Kong in breach of…

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A critical reaction to Joost Pauwelyn and Krzysztof Pelc’s “The WTO Secretariat’s ‘Open Secret’: Unpacking the Controversy”

September 5, 2022

In their EJIL:Talk! posts of August 18  and 19, in which they respond to a Reply by Armin Steinbach, Joost Pauwelyn and Krzystof Pelc heavily criticized the role of the WTO Secretariat in supporting the WTO panels. In their opinion, which is based on previous research by them published in a recent issue of…

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Overcoming the Global Vaccine and Therapeutics Lag and ‘Vaccine Apartheid’: Abuse of Rights in the EU’s Continued Blocking of the TRIPS Waiver for COVID Vaccines and Related Medicines

January 5, 2022

Entering the third year of this global pandemic, the United States posted a grim global record of 1 million COVID cases on 3 January 2022.  This record, of course, exists in a shadow of relative non-transparency about COVID incidences, fatalities, and hospitalizations in many parts of the world, arising either from authoritarian regimes refusing to provide…

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The second chapter on a national security exception in WTO law: the panel report in Saudi Arabia – Protection of IPR

July 22, 2020

Introduction For many decades, national security exceptions had been dealt with only in rare instances, under the GATT 1947 regime as well as under the law of the WTO. The scope and design of the national security exception of Art. XXI GATT 1947 which served as a model for Art. XIV bis GATS and Art. 73 TRIPS has…

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Who controls WTO dispute settlement? Reflections on the Appellate Body’s crisis from a socio-professional perspective

January 13, 2020

  Last month marked a crucial moment in the history of the World Trade Organization (WTO)’s dispute settlement system. On 10 December 2019, the terms of office of Appellate Body (AB) members Ujal Bhatia and Thomas Graham came to an end, thereby leaving the World Trade Court without the minimum complement of adjudicators necessary to carry out its…

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