27 novembre 2017: Madame Leonila Guglia

Madame Leonila Guglia soutiendra, en vue de l'obtention du grade de docteure en droit, sa thèse intitulée :

« Progressive development of the WTO Accessions: The influence of the commitments undertaken by the new Members on the Single (Legal) Undertaking »

Lundi 27 novembre 2017 - 9h.30
Salle 3050 - UNI MAIL

La séance est publique.

Résumé:

The thesis concludes that the Single [Legal] Undertaking, having emerged during the Uruguay Round as a package of rights and obligations aimed at unifying [initial] legal statuses of the WTO Members and creating parity between them, following fragmentation of the late-GATT era, is itself subject to a number of limitations thus maintaining its stronghold only to a limited extent. Meanwhile, as recognised by the WTO DSM, the terms agreed upon accession, which enter the legal framework of the WTO as a part of a Member-specific covered agreement, could deviate from the Single [Legal] Undertaking, still being enforceable unless restricting rights of the other Members. Such terms often serve a prognostic function, potentially paving way to multilateralization of the solutions tried out through the accession practice.

Currently, systematic deviations introduced by the accession commitments mostly impact trade in goods, framework for making and enforcing policies and transparency domains, where new Members have undertaken permanent and transitional commitments adding to their obligations under the covered agreements or [temporary] suspending rights originating from such. The impact of the accession commitments on the trade in services, aside from extension of certain GATT disciplines thereto, for instance in the area of state trading, follows a different pattern, since new rules are mostly introduced into the sectors subject to market access and national treatment concessions, with their scope and impact to be measured in conjunction with such concessions made by the respective new Members. Finally, in the TRIPS domain, the departure from the Single [Legal] Undertaking framework mostly amounts to giving up flexibilities linked to implementation of the Agreement, with assuming of extra substantive obligations amounting to a less common occurrence.

Meanwhile, certain aspects of the WTO accessions practices and outcomes do reinforce the notion of the Single [Legal] Undertaking. For instance, a new Member  must accept the whole package of legal rights and obligations without being able to cherry-pick between the covered agreements; multiple commitments simultaneously belong to the two or all the three substantive domains (e.g. trade in goods, services and TRIPS), proving existence of linkages between them; finally, majority of the terms of the accession packages up to date could still be defined as WTO-Neutral or WTO-Neutral-Detailed terms, reiterating existent WTO obligations or detailing ways to comply with them.