The commitments entered into in the WTO Telecommunications Agreement include a fairly elaborate set of principles designed to encourage and protect competition in this newly liberalising market. This paper analyses these commitments, to see first of all what they mean for the telecommunications...

The mechanism of Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) allows private foreign investors to challenge government measures before an ad hoc international arbitral tribunal. ISDS has been in existence for a long time. Yet recently this mechanism has proven very controversial, notably in the...

For several years now, the European Parliament has been calling for better enforcement of environmental and labour provisions in the EU's FTAs. Recently, the topic entered the political limelight within Member States. Private stakeholders and academic observers have pointed out weaknesses in the...

The current system of remedies in the WTO provides Members with a choice between trade compensation or retaliation. There is a problem in that trade compensation is only possible with the consent of the non-complying country and thus often remains theoretical, while retaliation has the...

The EU’s weak promotional policy towards sustainability in its free trade arguments isup for revision. Labour and environmental standards need to be tightened. They weregiven a boost on balance by a remarkable panel ruling of January 2021 in the longstandingEU–Korea labour dispute....

Remedies in international law present an intriguing challenge: what happens if a sovereign state refuses to comply with its obligations, even after an international adjudicatory body has ruled in its disfavour? The absence of compulsory enforcement arguably means that international law as a...