Equity and Equitable Principles in the World Trade Organization: Addressing Conflicts and Overlaps Between the WTO and Other Regimes

摘要

The World Trade Organization (WTO) and its law is a system of balance and contradictions. On the one hand, it matches a comparatively detailed set of legal obligations with startling gaps in the covered agreements - explicitly as in Art X of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), which mandated further negotiations,1 implicitly as regards standard of review where it was understood that members would return to discuss the appropriate standard between the applicable Article 11 of the Dispute Settlement Understanding (DSU) or the more deferential Art 17.6 of the Anti-Dumping Agreement,2 or accidentally such as in Art 2.1 of the Agreement on Safeguards where the text is 'deficient', mandating an economic test which cannot be fulfilled without further implying a number of assumptions into the economic analysis.3 On the other hand, WTO law is relatively self-contained in that it includes the legal apparatus for rule-creation, rule-elaboration, and rule-interpretation and has been (to date) almost exclusively focussed on regulating matters which fall under its trade mandate - and yet, the influence of trade and trade regulation is wide and deep, drawing the attention of interest groups from many other areas of international law, most notably environmental, human, investment, and labour rights.