Second Semeseter International Law Emba-Mba

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SECOND SEMESTER EMBA/MBA International Law 3. What are the integrated and distinctive legal order of WTO? Explain. Ans. The WTO is both a traditional and modern institution back to top The WTO is an international organization. This may seem obvious, and yet it took over 50 years to achieve that result! This protracted effort to acquire a legal existence has left its marks. This may explain why today it remains a very traditional and classical international organisation while, at the same time, it has developed very modern features. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which was replaced by the WTO in 1994, was a provisional agreement that entered into force in January 1948 and which was to disappear with the treaty creating the International Trade Organization (ITO). Since that treaty creating the ITO was never ratified, the GATT remained, for a half a century, an agreement in simplified form which, in principle, did not provide for any institutional framework. Thus, the GATT did not have “members” but “contracting parties”, a term which highlighted the purely contractual nature of the arrangement. It was only with the creation, some 50 years later, of the Marrakech Agreement establishing the WTO that a true international organization was finally created possessing its own international legal personality. To avoid any ambiguity, the Agreement Establishing the World Trade Organization (WTO) states in Article VIII that the “Organization shall have international legal personality”. No other international organization needs to repeat in its constitution that it is an international organization but the WTO members felt they had to do so — and I believe they were proud to do so. The implications of this status are numerous. As with all international organizations, the competencies of the WTO are limited by the principle of speciality. The WTO is concerned

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