This is a guest post from Petros Mavroidis: This time it is different. It is difficult to say how serious it is, but it is different. President Trump’s trade policy is a decisive turn towards unilateralism followed by bilateral deals.  This combination is a blow to the multilateral edifice

As we have talked about on this blog, the Safeguards Agreement provides for compensation/suspension where safeguards measures are used. Here is Article 8.1: A Member proposing to apply a safeguard measure or seeking an extension of a safeguard measure shall endeavour to maintain a substantially equivalent level of

This is from Janyce McGregor of the CBC: The preliminary trade agreement the U.S. recently reached with Mexico may offer a glimpse of what could happen with NAFTA's Chapter 11. A U.S. official said the two countries wanted ISDS to be "limited" to cases

GATT Article XXIV:5 refers to the "formation" of a customs union or a free-trade area: the provisions of this Agreement shall not prevent, as between the territories of contracting parties, the formation of a customs union or of a free-trade area or the adoption of

Sometimes I blog about the most important issues of the day. Other times, I look for obscure issues that will be of interest to, at most, 4 or 5 people. This is one of the latter. This is from the interim review section of the Russia - Railway Equipment panel report:

Canadian negotiators are meeting with U.S. negotiators today, to see if they can build on the U.S. - Mexico deal and finalize a new NAFTA. One key issue will be Chapter 19: The U.S. wants it out, while the Canadians want to keep it. Here's something

So much happened in the trade policy world today. I'm going to mention four things. These are probably not the most important four, but they are the four that piqued my interest enough to blog about them. 1. In NAFTA, it looks like the sunset clause -- automatic expiration

This is from Bloomberg: While a U.S. proposal to increase tariffs on cars imported from Mexico that don’t meet stricter new content rules was a sticking point as recently as last week, that issue appeared to be resolved by Thursday. The U.S. agreed to keep the 2.

This is a guest post from trade lawyer Adarsh Ramanujan In this part, I will cover the point where the Complainants went wrong, regarding Article 16.1. This provision states – “The owner of a registered trademark shall have the exclusive right to prevent all third parties not having the owner’

This is a guest post from trade lawyer Adarsh Ramanujan As a practitioner in international trade law, I have always loved the WTO Dispute Settlement Body (DSB) Reports (the Appellate Body Reports more than the Panel Reports, to be honest). They are structured and well-written, though unnecessarily lengthy at