This paper addresses the paradox of trade dispute settlement in which countries allocate resources to the creation of dispute settlement mechanisms in regional trade agreements even as the WTO's system has become the primary forum for the arbitration of state-to-state disputes. I argue that...

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...

Article 3.2 of the World Trade Organization (WTO) Understanding on the Rules and Procedures Governing the Settlement of Disputes (DSU), and WTO panel decisions confirm that the WTO is 'embedded' to some extent into the wider corpus of public international law. The degree to which WTO dispute...

This article will China's participation in the WTO dispute settlement process since its admission into the organization in 2001 to 2011. The aim of the article is to demonstrate China's changing attitude towards its role in the multilateral trading system by focussing on China's engagement with...

The Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (“TRIPS Agreement”) is the first WTO agreement requiring Members to establish a relatively detailed set of substantive norms within their national legal systems, as well as requiring them to establish enforcement measures...

The article focuses on the role of the NGOs in the dispute settlement process of the WTO. It argues that NGOs participation is underpinned by the emerging norm of participatory democracy. Given the growing expectations about WTO's accountability, transparency and democratic legitimacy, the NGOs...

The Article proposes new interpretations of GATT Article XX to minimize the harmful effects of recent WTO jurisprudence that threaten to undermine the goals of the trading system and diminish the role of states in policymaking. In the Shrimp/Turtle cases the WTO's Appellate Body (AB) utilized an...

This study contributes to the debate concerning the appropriate role of multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) in in WTO dispute settlement. Its distinguishing feature is that it seeks to address this relationship in light of the reason why the parties have chosen to separate their...

Almost all WTO dispute panels exceed their statutory time limits. This is often seen to indicate a more general problem for panels to manage their tasks. The time required varies considerably across panels however, suggesting that they do not face the same problems. To shed light on these...

This chapter examines the crisis of the WTO dispute settlement system (DSS) in connection with the blocking of the appointment of new Appellate Body (AB) members by the United States (US). In this context, it investigates the reasons behind this decision and evaluates the reactions of the other...