Law Commons^™

Non-Violation Complaints: Wto Issues And Recent Free Trade Agreements, Locknie Hsu

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The proliferation of free trade agreements (FTAs) in the last decade has resulted in an accompanying increase in dispute settlement regimes pertaining to those agreements. One obvious consequence is that increasingly, states are exposing themselves to such complaints, and not necessarily with the limitations that have been imposed on the at General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT)/World Trade Organization (WTO). The inherent ambiguity surrounding non-violation complaints at the WTO, and other risks relating to such complaints, are being multiplied manifold by these FTAs. The non-violation concept appears to have originated even before the GATT came into being. Developing-country FTA …

Regional Economic Arrangements And The Rule Of Law In The Americas: The Human Rights Face Of Free Trade Agreements, Stephen J. Powell

UF Law Faculty Publications

We have addressed the widespread criticism that international trade rules are insensitive to basic human rights and that globalization has done little with its enormous power to preserve exhaustible natural resources and otherwise promote sustainable development, to alleviate the gap between rich and poor, to encourage states to grant their citizens basic human rights contained in the U.N. Covenant on Human Rights and other treaties, to resolve the often conflicting policies underlying essential human rights and trade goals, and, in general, to integrate trade and critical human rights law on the global front.

Our focus in this Essay is on …

The Promotion Of Free-Trade Areas Viewed In Terms Of Most-Favored-Nation Treatment And "Imperial Preference", Sydney M. Cone Iii

Michigan Journal of International Law

This Article will first examine the relevant WTO provisions that permit free-trade agreements as exceptions to MFN treatment. It will then situate current U.S. policy in the context of the history and purpose of those provisions. Next, the discussion of history and purpose will take up a key debate in the original GATT negotiations, in which the United States championed MFN treatment, while European countries, in particular, Great Britain, sought to retain preferential trading arrangements-arrangements once associated with the rubric of "imperial preference." Against this background, the article will explore the question of whether current U.S. policy represents a reversion …