Document Type
Book Chapter
Publication Date
6-2025
Abstract
From one dispute between 1948 and 1994, there have now been 14 requests for a panel establishment (based on the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), Article XXI – the exception for national security) during the World Trade Organization (WTO) era (1995–now). The majority of them ended up in the issuance of a panel report, all of which were issued after 5 April 2019. As the WTO Appellate Body has been dysfunctional as of November 2019, no appellate report has been issued. Appeals have been lodged, but as there is no Appellate Body to entertain them, they were lodged ‘into the void’, thus depriving the panel reports of any legal significance.
The panel reports constitute only the tip of the iceberg. There are dozens of notifications, and a high number of specific trade concerns have been raised before WTO bodies. A likely explanatory variable is that, unlike the GATT (which was established by the winners of WWII, who, with minor exceptions, were like-minded players, initially at least), the WTO has been a global institution ab initio. 80Swayed by the spirit of a unipolar world, it gradually encompassed heterogeneous players. Frictions between them, like the Ukraine-Russia conflict, were translated into trade frictions as well. Geopolitics, as Hoekman et al have argued, have had a lot to do with the observed phenomenon.
Disciplines
International Economics | International Trade Law | Law
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Petros C. Mavroidis,
Litigating National Security in the WTO Era,
International Economic Law as Symphony: Thomas Cottier and the Harmonies of Trade, Krista Nadakavukaren Schefer, Rodrigo Polanco & Pierre Sauvé (Eds.), Hart Publishing
(2025).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/4656