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Hello everybody and welcome to our first lesson in the subject of international trade law for the Law Academy.
Introduction to WTO law: what the World Trade Organization is, its core agreements (GATT, GATS, TRIPS), and key principles like MFN and national treatment.
Key Takeaways
- The WTO is the institutional framework governing international trade through a collection of agreements rather than a single statute.
- WTO law succeeds the 1947 GATT, with the 1994 Marrakech Agreement establishing the current legal structure.
- The MFN and national treatment principles are foundational non-discrimination rules in WTO law.
- Reducing tariff barriers and discriminatory trade practices is a central goal of the system.
What the video covers
- Introduces international trade law as an area of public international law centred on the World Trade Organization (WTO).
- The WTO was established via the Marrakech Agreement in 1994 and opened in 1995, succeeding the original GATT of 1947.
- WTO law is not a single statute but a collection of agreements forming the multilateral trading system, covering goods, services, and intellectual property.
- Core agreements discussed include the GATT, the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), and the TRIPS Agreement.
- WTO law emphasises constraining trade policy, especially reducing tariff barriers through successive negotiation rounds.
- Tariffs are explained as taxes on imports that can be protectionist, cut against comparative advantage, and provoke retaliation.
- The most-favoured-nation (MFN) principle (GATT Article 1) requires equal treatment of imports from all members.
- The national treatment principle (GATT Article 3) requires imported goods and services to be treated no less favourably than domestic ones once in the market.
- Dispute settlement is highlighted as a central and heavily challenged feature of the WTO, particularly since the Appellate Body crisis around 2016.
- The video outlines a series of about 50 future lessons covering topics such as SPS measures, customs unions, subsidies and countervailing measures.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction to International Trade Law
- 01:01What the WTO Is and Its Legal Scope
- 02:31From GATT 1947 to the WTO (1994)
- 03:56Core Principles: Tariff Reduction and Trade Liberalisation
- 07:05Non-Discrimination: MFN and National Treatment
- 09:38Dispute Settlement and the Appellate Body Crisis
- 13:00Course Scope and Future Lessons
- 22:00Recommended Reading
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
In this video we are going to take an introduction to the subject of international trade law, specifically the law of the World Trade Organization.
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We're going to outline what the WTO is, the importance of the WTO within the sort of broader framework of international law, some of the core agreements that are important to WTO law, and then start to outline the scope
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of this series of lessons, the sort of 50 or so videos that we're going to be doing into the future looking at the various different key and important aspects of international trade law.
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So, when we talk about international trade law, there's a few things in which we could actually be talking about. We could talk be talking about trade more generally, we could be talking about elements of of things like sale of goods
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and and and and and the law of shipping and things like that and maritime law.
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But what I'm thinking about here is I'm thinking specifically about an area of public international law that concerns the World Trade Organization, the WTO.
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Now, the WTO is a legal institution which was created in the 1990s and was created as the part of the establishment of the World Trade Organization in 1995.
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The World Trade Organization essentially has the job of governing international trade between its member countries. And it consists of treaties, agreements, rules, obligations, all of these different kinds of things concerning not just trade in goods, but also things
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relating to services, intellectual property, things that concern trade in goods. So things like environmental and human rights protections, things like investment law as well.
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It is not a single statute. There's no WTO statute. There are a collection of agreements that together form the current multilateral trading system that we see and its institutional framework, the institution from which it comes, is the the WTO, the World Trade
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Organization. So, it represents the continuation of the original General Agreements on Tariffs and Trade, which was established all the way back in 1947. This is GATT law as it was described and there's quite a lot of jurisprudence that existed from 1947 all
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the way through to the 1990s concerning the law of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. However, the WTO essentially has succeeded that of the the law of the original GATT and it originates in the Marrakech Agreement concluded in 1994 to which we see the
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establishment of the WTO and its legal structure, which replaces this a previously existing agreement. Now, the GATT from 1947 versus the GATT or the established in 1994, they're very similar. There are lots of similar rules that you can see spreading across the
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two, but it is this newer agreement that forms part of the legal architecture of the institution of the World Trade Organization.
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So, we can see that going all the way back to 1994, we see the establishment of the WTO, which was then opened in 1995. But there are other agreements that exist within the WTO as well. So you have the General Agreement on
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Tariffs and Trade. You have the General Agreement on Trade in Services to govern trade in services. You also have other agreements such as the TRIPS Agreement, which looks at regulating trade related intellectual property rights.
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And so from this we can see that there are a number of very core tenant features of WTO law that we will be exploring in more detail in the future videos on that partic- on these particular topics. But I want to just
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provide you with an overview of what the WTO seeks to establish and the core rules that you can see where there's a heavy emphasis placed on them. So, the the the WTO law places a heavy emphasis on principles that constrain
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trade policy, constraining trade policy in a way that benefits WTO members as a whole. There is a general tendency, for example, to be to be aiming for political declarations to reduce tariff barriers, for instance.
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So, a tariff, which we will get to again what what a tariff is, but a tariff is essentially a tax on imports. It's a tax that is presented on things that are imported into a particular country. Now, tariffs aren't particularly very good
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for trade liberalization. For one part, they often can be quite protectionist. They often lead to benefiting domestic production of similar goods and products, which is which is often protectionist, which sort of sort of pushes against this basic idea
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of comparative advantage, this idea that states some countries or some institutions, some companies are just better at creating some things than others. And so rather than having every country create everything, you have some countries that specialize and then we
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trade across various different states. They're also quite damaging for the fact that tariffs tend to encourage retaliation, retaliatory tariffs in order to try and level the playing field, which can reduce lead to a restriction of and a reduction in trade.
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And so as we have seen with the WTO, a number of different rounds of tariff negotiations have taken place, which slowly leads to the reduction of tariff barriers. And that's one of the core principles of the law of the WTO.
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There are also other practical legal norms that can be established by the WTO as well, such as the basic principles of non-discrimination.
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So, not only does the WTO seek to try and reduce tariff barriers, but it also seeks to establish rules in which tariff barriers do not discriminate, in which tariff barriers do not benefit one over the other in terms of states. This can
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be seen in the one of the most foundational principles of the WTO found in Article 1 of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which is this idea of the most favored nation standard, the MFN treatment standard.
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This is basically a principle that tells us that members must treat the imports from all other members no less favorably than they treat imports from any one member. There is a variety of different bits of jurisprudence and case law that
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establishes the the the confines and the sort of delimits the the parameters of this basic principle, but fundamentally what this is telling us is if you have bananas, for instance, that come from country A and some bananas that also come from country B, you
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cannot treat one set of bananas less favorably, i.e. placing tariffs or placing restrictions on that country over the other country in a way that would be discriminatory towards one country over the other. That's the basic idea of the most favored nation
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standard. The second non-discrimination standard concerns national treatment. This is found in Article 3 of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. And it This basically tells us that imported goods and services must be treated no less favorably than domestic goods and
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services once inside the market. So whereas the most favored nation standard is concerning two different countries that are importing products into your country, the national treatment standard is looking at the relationship between all the all the discriminatory dynamics that
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exist between an imported good versus a domestically produced good. Let's say you're a country that produces domestically bananas and you are importing bananas from a third state as well. The national treatment standard tells us that you cannot treat the imported products less
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favorably once they are inside your market than the ones that you have produced domestically. And so it sort of represents an embodiment of this most favored nation standard, but the dynamics of which change because we're thinking not about two different
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countries, we're thinking about the relationship between an import from a different country and the domestic production in that country.
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The goal of trying to maintain these two discriminatory non-discriminatory principles is to reduce discriminatory trade practices and to try and foster equal cooperation conditions between member states of the WTO.
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You also have rules concerning market access. So there are limitations with regards to things like tariffs and trade barriers and the obligation that members negotiate tariff reductions and try to instigate and install a number of transparent regulations with
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regards to their trading rules. The WTO also looks to try and promote fair competition and discouraging protectionist practices that are distortionary in terms of their measures.
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We also see that one of the most important aspects of the WTO that we're going to get into in a lot of detail, we're going to spend a good few videos looking at this area, and that is this
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idea of dispute settlement. This is the core of the WTO and what separates the WTO from previously existing trade arrangements and also from other international organizations. It is described in by some in some textbooks as the jewel in the crown of the WTO,
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the ability to quickly and effectively resolve disputes between member states with regards to their trading practices is one of the most foundational and most important aspects of WTO law.
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We'll get to, by the way, why dispute settlement is so important, but also why it has been challenged so strongly in the past 10 or so years really at this point or going all the way back to 2016
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through to the 2020s. In fact, I was studying for international trade law for my master's degree at the point at which the WTO dispute settlement crisis was really reaching its crescendo when the last judge that that allowed for a quorum of
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of appellate body jurisdiction left the left the WTO institution and and therefore there was no longer a working appellate body within the WTO.
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I believe that was in 2020. With regards to the sources of WTO law, you have your primary agreements, you have your Marrakech agreement and the covered agreements of the WTO itself, the GATT, the GATS, the TRIPS, the TRIMS
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agreement for instance. You also have rules and regulations relating to sanitary and phytosanitary products. You also have the the interpretive and and procedural elements of the dispute settlement body, the the dispute settlement understanding agreement.
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But then you also have the interpretive authority of the dispute resolution system, the WTO jurisprudence, the panel reports and the appellate body reports. This plays a major role in clarifying how WTO law applies in disputes and effectively serves as a body of interpretive
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authority and is a very key focus with regards to WTO case study. When we look at the provisions of the treaties of the WTO, we have to look at how they have been interpreted by the dispute settlement body and by the appellate
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body reports to get an understanding of of what is meant by these different ideas.
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And then finally, you have to remember that the WTO exists within and is instantiated within this broader corpus of public international law. So, we will think about the position of the WTO within international law more broadly in in in its own separate video. We'll look
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at it in fact in a few videos time looking at the idea of the WTO as a an embodiment of public international law. Something that is not always identified. Not many textbooks for instance include a whole section on WTO
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law or even international economic law itself. It's sort of seen as an outlier within the broader confines of international law principles, but various different areas of international law are very very important. Jurisprudence from the ICJ is very very important.
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Fundamental principles and general principles of law as identified by the ICJ statute are very important principles of pacta sunt servanda within basic treaty obligations, principles of equity, principles of good faith, and also principles of dispute settlement between states are all very important
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aspects of WTO law and they come from and they originate from public international law more broadly.
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So, with all of this in mind then, let's think about how and what we are going to be studying over the next in fact the total number of lessons is 57 56, sorry.
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56 lessons into the future. What we're going to begin by I'm going to read out everything on the screen by the way because the text is quite small, but we're going to begin by taking a look at some of the introductory topics within
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the WTO and looking at an introduction to World Trade Organization law. We'll spend a bit of time thinking about international trade theory. So, thinking about the idea of comparative advantage, thinking about the idea of why reduction of trade barriers and the
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speedy and efficient flow of trade across member states is so important within a basic liberal understanding of international economic law. And we'll understand why protectionism is seen as so damaging and why tariffs are seen as quite damaging to the international
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the way in which the the sort of liberal structure of international law is established.
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We'll think about the history of international trade going all the way through to the GATT from 1947 looking at the legacy of the original General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and what kind of principles are derived from that
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original agreement that can then be translated into the modern agreements that we see from from Marrakech and and from the and from the agreements in the 1990s.
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We will then think about the World Trade Organization itself, its objects and its functions, its structure and its membership. So, thinking about it from an institutional perspective.
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We will then move on to looking at another part of the institution of WTO law, which is of course its dispute settlement body. We'll think about the jurisdiction of the WTO dispute settlement system. We'll think about what the process of dispute resolution
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actually looks like. We will look at a number of different sort of academic debates surrounding dispute settlement.
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So, we will first concern ourselves with the issue of developing countries and how they have related to dispute settlement systems given of course the growing and continual north-south divide with regards to sort of the economic efficiencies of states. You might be
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interested in knowing that there are of course debates about the ways in which developing countries have engaged with dispute settlement, specifically dispute settlement at the WTO.
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In fact, engaged with it in a in a relatively positive light compared to other international organizations bodies of of of resolutions. In fact, the fact one of the reasons why we get what will be known as the appellate body
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crisis is partially because of the fact that developing countries were so strong in in getting judgments against countries like the United States in in in in the past. And this gives rise to the appellate body crisis. We'll think about what the appellate body
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crisis actually is, the unique structure of dispute settlement within the WTO that allows for or at least creates the conditions for an appellate body crisis.
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And then we will think at the end of that lesson about ways in which we might be able to resolve the appellate body crisis. Is the appellate body dead and therefore potentially the WTO or is there are there at least should I speak
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English? Are there different ways in which we might be able to resolve the appellate body crisis?
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And how have states since the start of the appellate body crisis been able to get around the problems that are created by this crisis? Looking for instance at the binding nature of panels rather than that of the appellate body as one of the
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ways in which some especially developing country states have have chosen to deal with this particular problem.
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From there then, we are going to start looking at the substance of WTO law itself. First thinking about non-discrimination, thinking about the most favored nation standard, thinking about it in a variety of different contexts in addition to the idea of
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national treatment. We shall then think about the idea of tariff barriers. Looking at the distinction between customs duties and other duties and charges explicitly tied to imported goods as well as non-tariff barriers as well. Things like quantitative restrictions and market
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access barriers with regards to trade in services. And that will be topics five and topic six. Topic seven will concern ourselves with technical barriers to trade, the TBT agreement and the importance of and the importance of regulations of of technical barriers to
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trade. Whereas topic eight will concern the issue of sanitary and phytosanitary measures. This is of course with regards to the SPS agreement. We will think about what the core obligations are under the SPS agreement, the idea of harmonization with international
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standards as per article three of the SPS agreement as well as things like risk assessment and measures designed in article five of the SPS agreement.
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From there, there are going to be three topics which will encompass about 10 lessons looking at exceptions within the WTO. Now, different textbooks and different lecturers and different professors and different people structure exceptions in different ways.
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I'm basically going to be dividing it into three major categories of exceptions. You have the idea of general exceptions as identified by GATT article 20, the two-tier test of the general exceptions requirements as well as any kind of introductory clause clause
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requirements as found in in in this particular provision. And then I'm going to move on to looking at emergency exceptions, economic emergency exceptions concerning safeguarding measures, security exceptions as well as balance of payments exceptions as found in articles 12
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article 12 of the GATT as well. And then I'm going to include in this particular topic regional trade agreements and customs unions as an exception because they technically are an exception because they represent a different way in which you are able to
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relate to the rules specifically of non-discrimination within WTO law. So, within WTO law, we know already that there is this sort of general non-discrimination principle that exists as per articles one and three of the GATT with regards to MFN and national
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treatment. Regional trade arrangements or or customs unions provides an exception to that where you are able to basically violate the rules of non-discrimination as part of trading within the confines of a customs union. So, think for example about the way EU member states
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trade and relate to each other within the single market versus how they as the EU relates to other countries that are outside the EU.
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This is an a perfect example of what would be on paper a violation of basic non-discrimination principles.
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You treat as an EU member state your relationship with other EU member states more favorably than you do with non-member states of the EU with regards to trading in services and goods. And but this is not a violation of WTO law
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because it represents a regional trade exception. We'll think about what the conditions are for valid regional trade exceptions are and the way in which services trading services relates to this as well.
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And then finally the final two topics will be concerning both dumping and anti-dumping measures. What the basic legal framework exists there determining what dumping is, material injury, the causal link, all of these different kinds of things before then finishing in
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this final group of videos looking at subsidies and countervailing measures. So looking at the SCM agreement, the definition of a subsidy, the type of subsidies that exist under WTO law, and then finally looking at countervailing measures.
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There are other parts of WTO law that I've chosen not to include. They might include in a more advanced topic. So for instance, I'm not going to spend much time or energy or detail going into looking at intellectual property rights
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with regards to the WTO. Nor will I think about things like the environment or investments or the future of the WTO, the politics of the WTO, all those different kinds of sort of subsidiary topics. I might go into them in more
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detail in the future. But for now this is going to be the series that we're looking at from now video one in this lesson all the way down to video 56 at the end.
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Like I said, these are things that I'm going to not consider and and not include in the in the broader framework of looking at WTO law.
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And so this concludes this first lesson on the law of the WTO or international trade law. These are the citations in terms of textbooks that are very very important if you want to get a good understanding of WTO law. The text cases
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and materials book from Cambridge University Press is in my opinion probably the best one.
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There are some commentaries that are a little bit older. You also have the practice and policy from from the Oxford University Press. Again, it's a bit older but the most up-to-date one is the Van den Bossche and and and and Zdouc's
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law and policy of the World Trade Organization. Where there are any citations and and case citations or even academic papers or book citations that are that are going to be included on the on the slides, they will be included with a
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citation on the screen there. But for for for for broad context, the main three textbooks here are going to be relied upon when looking at this particular area of international trade law.
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I hope everyone has enjoyed this video and I hope to see people for the next video looking at firstly looking at international trade theory and then diving into a little bit of the history of the WTO before thinking about its
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core functions and objections.
Topics:WTOinternational trade lawGATTmost favoured nationnational treatmenttariffsTRIPSGATSdispute settlementpublic international law
