From Inside US Trade:
In advance of the negotiating round for a Trade In Services Agreement that kicked off today (July 8), the European Union proposed a text on dispute settlement that does not reflect the EU's previous demand for a dispute settlement system with an appeals process, according to informed sources.
The EU decided to forgo including the appeals process in its non-paper on dispute settlement because it wanted to avoid the extended discussion it would have likely generated. This could have delayed the negotiations, and thereby made it harder to reach a TISA deal this year, sources said.
Appellate review in trade dispute settlement seems to be on the way out. It is not, as far as I know, part of any of the major trade negotiations going on right now.
If we continue the current trend of having virtually no trade disputes under FTAs, this is probably not a big deal. But if FTA dispute settlement takes off, people may re-discover the problems that led them to create an appellate process at the WTO in the first place.
