From a recent op-ed: This month’s bombshell decision from the European Court of Justice pronouncing a “right to be forgotten” on the Internet was couched as a principled stand for digital privacy. Looking closer, however, one could see a double standard at work: The enormously expensive effects of

by André de Hoogh, cross-posted from the GUILD-blog Introduction Last March, a WTO panel issued its report on a dispute between the European Union, the United States and Japan on the one hand and China on the other concerning export duties imposed on certain rare earths, tungsten and

For those of you who could not attend, here's the video of our ISDS policy forum at Cato: http://www.cato.org/events/investor-state-dispute-settlement-mechanism-examination-benefits-costs I think we had a pretty good back and forth, with reasonable people on all sides. My

We've had some good discussions of the Seal Products AB report here on this blog over the past week or so.  There are definitely some differences of opinion as to what the AB meant in relation to the GATT non-discrimination obligations.  When will we get some clarification?

Folks, this is quite interesting.  The EU member states have just struck a compromise on the GMO regulation by providing individual member states with options to exclude the GMO importation.  (This deal is subject to subsequent legislative procedures involving the Commission and the European Parliament.)  Note that this is not

I continue to be frustrated and perplexed by an approach to GATT Article III and XX that considers different aspects of a measure in different parts of the legal analysis.  In that regard, here are some excerpts from the Seal Products AB report: Article I:1 5.95. We note

Plenty to think about when it comes to the “necessity” test applied by the AB to the EU seals ban (and especially the exceptions thereunder) under XX(a). What struck me, in particular, is how the AB set up the public morals justification as somehow fundamentally different from other objectives

It can be difficult to analyze legal standards in the abstract.  To make things more concrete, I've got a hypo that we can test under the Article III:4 test that the AB set out in Seal Products. Imagine a regulation by Country X that categorizes cars as

To say the least, there is some puzzlement among WTO lawyers as to exactly why the AB found that the TBT Agreement did not apply to the EU ban on products from commercial seal hunts.   The AB refered to the fact that the EU ban was based on characteristics of