The concept of national security has evolved to address a range of threats, including non-State actors and non-military and non-human threats, such as economic crises, cybersecurity, terrorism, iand climate change. In particular, some States are vigorously expanding the notion of national...

Transnational technical standard-setting has grown in prominence in recent years. The World Trade Organization (WTO) requires the use of international standards but adopts a deferential approach towards international standards. However, practice shows that several international standards are...

Trade regulation may never have been in more flux than it is now. Other than the emergence of ‘megaregionals' (such as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership-TTIP or the Trans-pacific Partnership-TPP) and the difficulties in finalizing the Doha Development Agenda, increased...

Owing to innovations and a growing consumer demand for better and safer products, the number of technical standards has been steadily increasing in recent years. As standardization is a major catalyst to global commerce, The World Trade Organization (WTO), a typical consensus-driven...

The increased importance of environmental protection led to the introduction of sustainability-related criteria in standard-setting practices. A discomfort with the functioning, working methods and certain rigidities of the global standardizing bodies such as the ISO led to a mushrooming of a...

This contribution illustrates some unresolved issues and tensions that characterize the way the WTO deals with renewable energy subsidies. Indeed, the indisputable urgency to address the negative impacts of climate change on the one hand, and the use of subsidies to boost and support a...

Renewable energy subsidies are crucial for combatting climate change, and yet the world’s international legal infrastructure is not designed to accommodate such subsidies. The world needs a renewable energy sector to develop and implement the technologies necessary to reduce carbon and...

In its less than 20 years of existence, the WTO has managed to draw public attention. Transparency in the WTO decision-making has been in the agenda of the multilateral trading system for several years. Pressures from developing countries and nongovernmental organizations in particular have led...

This note attempts to map the relevance of the emerging global law advocacy for the WTO. In this regard, it understands global law as an attempt to describe a growing decrease of the regulatory State and an ensuing increase of private rule-making. Global law intends to generate new thinking...

With greater importance given to the climate change debate, energy has slowly attracted the complete attention of the whole world. The energy sector can be roughly divided into renewable energy, on the one hand, and fossil fuels, on the other. The former category is at the core of all the main...