Developing country WTO Members struggle to make effective use of the WTO Dispute Settlement Understanding system due to a lack of capacity and limited resources. Without the ability to access technical assistance and legal support, these nations are at a disadvantage for successfully pursuing cases under the DSU system and ensuring compliance with DSU rulings. In response, ICTSD has invited dispute settlement and international trade policy expert, Professor Chad P. Bown of Brandeis University and the Brookings Institute to lead a roundtable discussion on the challenges developing countries face within the DSU system and possible solutions for resolving these problems. As part of ICTSD’s Cafe & Croissants series, this event will be an informal, off-the-record, lively dialogue and debate where all professionals interested in this topic are invited to participate.
WTO Members have increasingly made use of the WTO Dispute Settlement Understanding system to defend their trade and sustainable development interests since its introduction in the mid-1990s. Yet, developing country Members have struggled to effectively make use of this system. Lack of capacity and resources limits these countries’ ability to access technical assistance and legal support that is needed to successfully identify and pursue DSU cases. In response, ICTSD has organised an informal dialogue event that will examine this problem within the DSU system and offer ways it can be resolved.
The ICTSD-led event, entitled “Post-Doha Dispute Settlement and Developing Countries: Identifying and Addressing the Need for Improved Extra-Legal DSU Support,” will focus on two fundamental problems with the DSU system related to developing countries lack of capacity: first, trade disputes not initiated under the DSU; and second, the unprepared use of the DSU system. Led by Professor Chad P. Bown of Brandeis University and the Brookings Institute in the US, the dialogue will explore these problems ultimately leading to the proposition of solutions including the creation of a WTO institution that will assist developing countries in pursuing WTO enforcement.
The creation and workings of this proposed institute includes identifying where developing countries are making efforts to use DSU and what the outcomes—both successes and failures—of these cases are; working with stakeholders (NGOs, civil society, think tanks and the private sector) to reposition their skill-sets in order to take full advantage of the WTO enforcement system for economic development; and motivating the creation of a new WTO compliance monitoring institution that will bring together a network of available technical assistance that developing countries can access for help in effectively pursuing WTO enforcement.
The upcoming dialogue is part of ICTSD’s Cafe & Croissants series, which are informal, off-the-record dialogues and discussions, where visiting speakers are invited to introduce a timely issue that sits at the intersection of trade and sustainable development. Here, Professor Brown, an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics and the International Business School at Brandeis University and a non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institute, has been invited to lead the roundtable on the DSU system.
Organised for Wednesday 5 June 2008 in Geneva, Switzerland across from ICTSD’s offices in the International Environment House I, the event is open to all interested parties. ICTSD encourages a broad range of international stakeholders interested in these issues to participate and to engage actively in discussions, thereby enabling fruitful, innovative and lively dialogues to take place. Those interested in attending should contact Sheila Sabune at ssabune@ictsd.ch or Simon Jon Tans at stans@ictsd.ch or by fax at (+41) 22 917 80 93 to RSVP and for further information. Seating is limited.

The WTO case EC-Conditions for the Granting of Tariff Preferences to Developing Countries involved a challenge by India of special tariff preferences granted by the European Community (EC) to twelve developing countries in order “to combat drug production and trafficking” (the Drug Arrangements), resulting in decisions of a judicial panel and the Appellate Body of the World Trade Organization (WTO).3 Underthe Drug Arrangements, the EC granted preferential tariff rates to Pakistan and eleven other countries over and above the EC’s normal preference system for developing countries, the “Generalized System of Preferences” (GSP). The case has significant implications for all conditional grants of trade preferences, including those conditioned on human rights and intellectual property and investment protection. The decision likewise informs multilateral negotiations over “special and differential” treatment in the Doha negotiating round regarding the definition of beneficiaries and the content of preferences.4 Much of the academic analysis of this case, however, remains rather a-historic and de-contextualized. This article highlights some of the historical, political, sociological, and institutional contexts in which India’s GSP claims have been interpreted.

After providing background to the dispute and examining key ambiguities in the legal texts, we focus on three aspects of the interpretive context that are of broader concern and which, in our view, have not previously been developed: first, the normative framing and how that frame may elide the larger historical and political contexts of colonialism and asymmetric power in international economic relations (sections II and III); second, the institutional choices faced by the WTO judicial decision-makers when deciding over conditions for preferences, and the implications of these choices for participation in political, judicial and market decision-making (sections IV and V); and third, the potential shaping of judicial interpretation in response to commentary from an interpretive legal community that comes predominately from North America and Europe (section VI). However hyper-technical and brilliantly legalistic our reasoning may be, our interpretation of the ambiguities of the relevant legal texts will inevitably be affected by our backgrounds and normative approaches. Our backgrounds and normative inclinations affect the framing and understanding of a case in which a WTO judicial body exercises significant power.

The GSP system is arguably not that important for overall imports into the United States and Europe. It is reported that “only 1.3 percent of U.S. imports in 1999 entered duty-free under the GSP,”5 and only 3.1 percent of EC imports entered duty-free under the GSP in 1997.6 However, the GSP system remains important for many developing country sectors and it has been politically important in US and European relations with developing countries, where it has been heavily used, in particular, by promoters of enhanced intellectual property and labor rights. Moreover, the GSP case illustrates the centrality of institutional choice in the WTO judiciary’s handling of the linkage between WTO trade provisions and other policies. Those wholly familiar with the legal texts, the US and European preference systems, and the WTO judicial decisions may wish to skip or skim the next section that we provide as background.