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

Chad Brown and Kara Reynolds have released an interesting study on the trade stakes (dollar value) under the WTO dispute settlement system. (“WTO trade disputes, big and small”).  While their data confirms, intuitively, that WTO members are likely to litigate on big ticket items, such as the Boeing-Airbus dispute, the

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 retaliation for

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

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 now

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 it

The failure to agree yesterday at the WTO on the adoption of the Bali Trade Facilitation Agreement is widely being misrepresented in the media as the collapse of Bali and a new or renewed crisis for the WTO system.  True to their venerable habits of ultimatum diplomacy and pushing around

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