Originally from:
The WTO: Governance, Dispute Settlement & Developing Countries
The WTO: Governance, Dispute Settlement & Developing Countries-Digital
Chapter 24 - Preview Page
Legal Eagles? The WTO Appellate Body’s First Ten Years
Petros Mavroidis
This chapter is meant to provide an evaluation of the record of WTO adjudicating bodies. The advent of the WTO, and the ensuing establishment of a two-level adjudication process (panels and the Appellate Body), marks the passage to a compulsory third-party-adjudication system, an oddity in international relations: as per Article 23 of the DSU, WTO adjudicating bodies are the exclusive forum for adjudication of all disputes among WTO Members with respect to issues coming under the purview of the covered agreements. This feature (exclusive adjudication) is certainly a contributing factor towards the substantial rise (compared to the GATT era) of dispute settlement reports that have been issued since 1 January 1995.1 There is by now a critical mass of reports, which, to a large extent, provide the input for our evaluation.
Any evaluation is, by definition, subjective. At the same time, no evaluation can take place absent an understanding of the function of the adjudicating bodies being evaluated. Hence, in Section I, we begin with the question of what is expected from WTO adjudicating bodies. Section II contains a brief discussion of the record of the Appellate Body, whereas Section III includes suggestions for addressing some of the weaknesses that will hopefully have been established in Section II. Concluding remarks are offered in Section IV.
About the Author:
Petros Mavroidis is Edwin B. Parker Professor of Foreign & Comparative Law at Columbia Law School and Professor of Law at the University of Neuchatel.