WTO Dispute Settlement Body

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Living in the Shadow of Flawed Peace: How General International Law Is Implicated in the Trade War between Japan and South Korea

August 22, 2019

As the anniversary of V-J Day approaches, the legacy of World War II still casts a long shadow on its previous Pacific theatre.  Last month, an unprecedented quadripartite incident involving warplanes from, inter alia, Japan and South Korea played out in the territorial airspace of the contested Dokdo/Takeshima islands, disputed territory that was left unresolved in the postwar San Francisco Peace Treaty of 1951 (SFPT).  Yet, the warning shots fired above those tiny rocks is not the only instance of regional tensions heating up in Northeast Asia.  On 2 August, Japan decided to remove South Korea from its list of trusted trade partners, following its restrictions on the exportation of three important chemicals to South Korea imposed last month.  Days later, Japan pulled back and permitted export of a key chemical for semiconductor manufacturing in Korea.  The two Asian economic titans have since brought their trade war to the attention of the WTO’s General Council.  Yet the WTO is not the only international legal regime engaged in the escalating…

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The WTO Panel Ruling on the National Security Exception: Has the Panel ‘Cut’ the Baby in Half?

April 12, 2019

Recently, media attention has been captured by the unravelling trade war between the declining western hegemon and the rising eastern mega-power with other discussions, such as the reform of the WTO dispute settlement system, reflecting the points of the growing divergence between the two. Against this backdrop, the  Russia – Traffic in Transit…

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The Reviewability of the Security Exception in GATT Article XXI in Russia – Traffic in Transit: Implications for South China Sea Investment Disputes in GATT Article XXI-type Clauses in ASEAN Regional Investment Treaties

April 9, 2019

The landmark WTO Panel Report on security exceptions in GATT Article XXI came out Friday last week in Russia - Traffic in Transit.  I have written extensively about necessity and national emergency clauses in the past - particularly to reject the position of the supposed wholesale unreviewability of these clauses in the Schmittian sense (on GATT Article…

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WTO Dispute on the US Human Rights Sanctions is Looming on the Horizon

January 31, 2019

At the turn of the year, Venezuela initiated a WTO dispute with the United States. In a nutshell, Venezuela questions WTO-consistency of a number of coercive trade-restrictive measures (economic sanctions) imposed by the United States. Some of those restrictions were allegedly imposed on the human rights grounds. US sanctions against Venezuela The…

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Justiciability of Security Exceptions in the US Steel (and other) Disputes: Some Middle-Ground Options and the Requirements of Article XXI lit. b (i)-(iii)

November 20, 2018

The US – Certain Measures on Steel and Aluminium Products case (US Steel Dispute) has aroused numerous comments in the blogosphere (see e.g. here, here, here, here, here and here) which already give a very good impression of the legal questions involved and of what is at stake at the WTO these…

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