I was puzzled recently by an affirmation in a newspaper that a complainant country has some 90 percent chances of winning its case at the WTO. Since no domestic legal system has such a tendency, I tried to see if this figure could be confirmed. Unfortunately, in their interesting new statistical analysis about WTO cases (JIEL, vol 10, 2007), Simon Lester and Kara Leitner do not seem to give information about "win rates." Finally, all I have found is this footnote (!) in an article by Greenwald (JIEL, 2003, 113-124):
Countries that complain about other countries’ trade barriers have a ‘win rate’ of between 80-90 percent before WTO panels and the Appellate Body (and nearly 100 percent in cases challenging anti-dumping, countervailing and safeguard measures) . . . The complainant has won all but one of the anti-dumping, countervailing duty, safeguard measure challenges.
Of course, complainants do not prevail on all counts in their complaints and it might be that the consultation process weeds out bad cases. The fact remains however that this figure is unbelievable from the perspective of a domestic legal system. In fact, according to Greenwald, the only "frighteningly" similar figure could be found only in the US Department of Commerce which finds for complainants about 90 percent of the time.
Is the 90 percent "win rate" for complainants at the WTO something that could be confirmed, and if yes, what could be the cause of such a surprising figure? Does this figure mean for example that the United States has a 90 per cent chance of winning its piracy cases against China?