No surprise, but the EU/UK FTA imposes effectively no constraints on trade remedy use between the parties. Eight short, one-sentence paragraphs, with paragraph 8 carving paragraphs 1-6 out of dispute settlement. There is no value-added here beyond an (unenforceable) requirement to consider information on public interest (para. 6). The

As a Christmas gift of sorts, the UK and EU gave us their new trade agreement yesterday (still needs to undergo a legal scrub I think). There is a long section on creating a "level playing field." Here is a key bit of the part relating to "

Back in November, I posted about a preliminary US Commerce Department decision to treat certain free allowances under the EU's Emission Trading System as a countervailable subsidy.  The other shoe has now dropped, as the DOC on 11 December confirmed its conclusions in the final determinations in Forged

The Shadows of WTO Irrelevance Steve Charnovitz 14 December 2020 On 10 December 2020, WTO Deputy Director-General Alan Wolff gave a thoughtful presentation entitled “The WTO must not continue as it is.”  In his speech, DDG Wolff warns that “if the WTO does not engage fully with environmental issues, with

This is a guest post by Susan Isiko Štrba of International Lawyers and Economists for Development: COVID-19 caused a number of learning institutions, especially in the developing world, to come to a stand still. On the other hand, developing countries faithfully domesticated international Intellectual Property (IP) standards in an effort

How quickly things change. Just a few years ago some trade lawyers were proposing that FTAs refer their disputes to the WTO DS mechanism. Now, it seems that there is a new trend – addressing what are in effect WTO disputes through FTA dispute settlement. This week, an Arbitration Panel under