Joel was having trouble posting, so despite my name as the author of the post, this is actually from him:
Some readers of this blog are old enough to remember when I resisted arguments to apply international environmental law in WTO dispute settlement. My position then was based on a reading of the positive law of the DSU. I was always open to changing the positive law. If it was not clear then, it is clear now that it is urgent to do so—to incorporate more sustainable development (broadly understood) in the trade system. More accurately, and importantly, to harness the trade system to address pressing global problems, including but not limited to climate change and biodiversity destruction. I still believe that this is largely not properly a judicial task, especially under current law, but is an urgent “legislative”—treaty-making—task. During the past couple of years, along with my wonderful partners, Dan Esty and Jan Yves Remy, I have been seeking to educate myself on the ways in which sustainable development may be advanced through the trade system, through The Remaking Trade for a Sustainable Future Project. We have conducted 10 workshops and commissioned over 60 white papers, with hundreds of colleagues. I have been reading your work on these topics, but also spending a lot of time engaging with people who work in other areas and apply other disciplines. We consciously wanted to include people from different areas of sustainable development, to hear their views and understand their language—and then translate it into trade. The record of that education is The Villars Framework for a Sustainable Global Trade System. Have a look and let us know what you think. We’re open to corrections and suggestions. We’re open to help in advancing this agenda, and I know many of you have been working on this longer and more assiduously than I have. (The clickable document has internal links that will only work if you download the PDF. Google docs disables the links in the cloud for cybersecurity reasons.)
We’ll be presenting this project at the WTO Public Forum on Thursday, and more extensively seeking feedback in a meeting at the Villars Institute next weekend, with over 30 WTO ambassadors, and kick-off remarks by the WTO’s Ngozi Okonjo Iweala, UNCTAD’s Rebeca Grynspan and the ITC’s Pamela Coke Hamilton. We are hoping that the zeitgeist is now with us, so that we can help make trade a tool for sustainable development, although I regret that it has taken so long to get here.
