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Simon Lester

Simon Lester

Co-founder of WorldTradeLaw.net and China Trade Monitor. Non-resident fellow at the Baker Institute.

http://simonlester.com

CETA Text: The Treatment of Water

A fairly recent version of the CETA text has been leaked. The document date is August 1, 2014. No doubt there is some legal "scrubbing" still to do, and perhaps some actual negotiating as well, but this text seems pretty advanced, and thus ready for blogging. I'

Guest Post: Russian Sanctions, Polish Apples and the EU’s Litigation Strategy

This is a guest post from Boris Rigod, who has a Ph.D. from the EUI and is currently a law clerk at the Berlin Regional Court Poland announced its intention to initiate WTO proceedings against Russia over its import prohibition on Polish apples. The ban is Russia’s reaction

GATT Article XX an an Exception to the TBT Agreement

I was struck by this sentence from para. 5.56 of yesterday's China - Rare Earths Appellate Body report (made in the context of discussing the relationship between China's Accession Protocol and the Marrakesh Agreement/Multilateral Trade Agreements): Article XX of the GATT 1994 has been found

The Russian Food Import Ban under the DSU

From the Washington Post: Russia has aimed its latest cross-Atlantic swing at the American food industry. On Thursday, the country announced the suspension of billions of dollars in food imports from a number of countries — including Norway, Canada, Australia, the United States and the 28-nation European Union — in

ISDS in CETA: Some Ideas for a Compromise

The FT reports on how ISDS is holding up the CETA negotiations: The EU struck a political agreement on a trade accord with Ottawa last year but the deal has become mired in negotiations over investors’ rights. Berlin fears that German standards of environmental and consumer protection could be undermined

How the EU Influences WTO Jurisprudence

Following up on my blog post of earlier today, this is from Tilman Krueger: the EU actively contributes to rule development in the WTO also as a litigant in the context of WTO dispute settlement and in addition to its immediate, case-specific interests. Two examples for such behaviour will

Are the U.S. and EU Dominating Appellate Body "Law-Making"?

Joost raises an important systemic issue in a new paper: This contribution makes an empirical assessment of the role of precedent in WTO dispute settlement. As an imperfect proxy it counts cross-references between the 108 Appellate Body reports issued between 1996 and 2013. Using basic tools of network analysis

Is Yukos a Foreign Investment Dispute?

I haven't read any of the submissions or the opinion in the Yukos investment arbitration, which resulted in the biggest award ever -- $50 billion! -- and has been making headlines in the past week. But from the articles about the case, what struck me is that the claimaints were

Michael Trebilcock's SIEL Lecture

This is a synopsis of Professor Michael Trebilcock's recent SIEL lecture (written by Michael): In my recent Robert Hudec public lecture to the Society for International Economic Law at its biannual conference in Bern, Switzerland (“Between Theories of Trade and Development: The Future of the World Trading System,

Argentina Debt Issues and WTO Obligations

I'm a little late to the party on the most recent Argentine debt crisis. I hadn't been paying much attention, but someone asked me to speak about it at a conference in October, so I thought I better try to figure it out! There are a