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- Lehrstuhl für Öffentliches Recht, insbesondere Europarecht und Völkerrecht (Univ.-Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Weiß) (12) (remove)
Außenwirtschaftsbeziehungen
(2020)
The introduction will describe the constant evolving global political context correlated to the events occurring, specifically, in the trade environment and the unprecedented challenges they pose for the EU Trade Policy. These identified and introduced challenges will be addressed in detail in the following book chapters. It will also introduce the reader to the individual contributions of the book and briefly present and anticipate the results attained.
Considering the new focus of the European Union (EU) trade policy on strengthening the enforcement of trade rules, the article presents the proposed amendments to the EU Trade Enforcement Regulation 654/2014. It analyzes the EU Commission proposal and the amendments suggested by the European Parliament Committee on International Trade (INTA), in particular with regard to uncooperative third parties and the provision of immediate countermeasures. The amendments will be assessed in view of their legality under World Trade Organization (WTO), Free Trade Agreement (FTA), and general international law and in view of their political implications for the EU’s multilateralist stance. Finally, the opportunity to amend Regulation 654/2014 to use it for the enforcement of FTA trade and sustainable development chapters will be explored. The analysis shows that the shift towards more effective enforcement should be pursued with due care for respecting existing international legal commitments and with more caution to multilateralism.
The book explores the impact of WTO law on domestic regulatory autonomy. It identifies and critically analyses the mechanisms working in WTO law that cause increasing interferences with domestic law and thus restrain the regulatory autonomy of the WTO members. The book proposes ways how WTO law be conceptualized to enhance the policy space of WTO members. Therefore, the book demonstrates the flexibilities in interpreting and applying WTO core principles and provisions and explores interpretive and institutional conceptions that could serve as a pathway of allocating greater policy leeway to WTO members.
The analyses presented address the disturbing observation that even though WTO law appreciates the regulatory leeway of WTO members in several provisions across agreements, the WTO judiciary´s case law, but also other governance mechanism active in the WTO appear to narrow down the WTO members´ regulatory autonomy and to considerably limit the space for domestic policy choices. Wide spread, even scholarly perception of the WTO, and most recently the Trump administration blame the WTO, in particular its dispute settlement branch, for being biased towards free trade and unduly restraining even legitimate domestic policies, and voiding the domestic policy space needed for addressing societal concerns and global problems. A closer look at the development of GATT/WTO law, however, reveals that, in GATT era, panels were aware of the effect their interpretations had on domestic policy space, and that some of the more recent WTO dispute settlement reports show attempts to expand WTO member´s leeway again. These observations are the starting point for an indepth analysis of the different mechanisms present in WTO law which impact on domestic regulation.