Dispute Settlement Mechanism Under World Trade Organisation: Practice And Procedure

Aditya Behera, LL.M, Intellectual Property and Trade Law, Christ Deemed to Be University

ABSTRACT

In the international arena, there are many ways to resolve disputes, including exhaustion of local remedies, International Court of Arbitration, Stock Home Arbitration, Singapore Arbitration, International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) and other arbitrations. But the fact is still that arbitration procedure begins with the consent of the parties that grant arbitration jurisdiction and, or assist the agency in arbitration. The world is moving towards globalization and the nature of international agreements in a globalized world whether multilateral, plurilateral or other forms are of great significance. With the advent of WTO, a global adjudication mechanism for goods emerged. But when the dispute mechanism is analyzed along with various arbitration awards after careful examination, it was found that there was inconsistency in the decision-making.

The nature of international trade conflict and international dispute resolution is different depending on whether the country concerned is a WTO member and if they use the multilateral WTO dispute settlement mechanism. If a country is not a WTO member, according to general international law, it has no right to the market and supply and have no right to require an independent third party to make a ruling on it international trade disputes. Therefore, if the investment of domestic enterprises is at risk as its trading partners decided to restrict access to their foreign markets, a negatively affected country can neither claim that its rights have been violated nor invoke international dispute settlement mechanism for the purpose of compulsory trade. On the contrary, if the same trade dispute occurs among WTO members, trade restrictions may prove to be inconsistent with the WTO laws and binding decisions on trade restrictions must be revoked. As removal of such trade restrictions tends to increase economic welfare, and the governments know that the GATT/WTO dispute settlement procedures can promote each other yielding beneficial results and can help the government to eliminate domestic protectionist pressure.