In an unusually law-intensive and wonderfully bilingual speech (evidencing a great command of the WTO jurisprudence) given at an ESIL meeting at the Sorbonne, Pascal Lamy made the following comments
The lack of coherence of our international legal system is amplified by the relative power of the WTO and in particular its dispute mechanism. This shows the discrepancy between the WTO's very powerful enforcement mechanism and the traditional decentralized system of counter measures still used in several legal orders. I do not think that the solution lies in weakening our dispute system. Many aspects of the WTO need to be improved but I believe that the WTO dispute settlement system works well. The solution to the potential imbalance I alluded to lies, I believe, in strengthening the enforcement (the effectiveness) of other legal orders so as to rebalance the relative power of the WTO in the international legal order.
This call will remind many readers of Renato Ruggiero's call for a World Environmental Organization to balance the WTO. The same question needs to be asked of Lamy as was asked of Ruggiero: assuming there are two organizations, and two courts, what will the choice of forum and choice of law rules be? One may understand that the world community is not comfortable with an assignment to the WTO dispute settlement body of jurisdiction to apply all international law, as there may be concern about an alleged trade-centric perspective of panels and the Appellate Body. But merely creating another court, with another set of potential or alleged biases, does not solve the problem of coherence.
