Options for future proofing regional trade agreement dispute settlement mechanisms

After decades of experience in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and the World Trade Organization, trading nations have become accustomed to orderly and predicable mechanisms for resolving their trade disputes. This post argues that growing challenges in the multilateral environment provide an impetus to consider how the lessons learned in the multilateral system can be applied to regional dispute settlement mechanisms in anticipation of increased use in the future. The international trading system is currently facing its greatest set of challenges ⁠ in decades. If it weren’t enough that efforts to update the multilateral trade rules have effectively stalled , governments must also increasingly fall back on the existing ones to defend against protectionist pressures . They are supported in this task by the elaborate dispute settlement mechanisms (DSMs) that have been developed over the last seven decades, both multilaterally – originally under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and then in the World Trade Organization (WTO) – and as stand-alone components of regional trade agreements (RTAs). The emerging conundrum of trade dispute settlement, however, is that while many RTAs now include substantive obligations that are WTO-plus (more onerous versions of existing WTO disciplines) and WTO-extra...

Written by Robert McDougall