The Role and Effectiveness of the WTO Dispute Settlement Mechanism

The world trade organization (WTO) has been in existence for slightly more than five years. Its predecessor, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), operated for almost fifty years as a provisional treaty and institution, but the WTO has a definitive organizational structure recognized under international law. By most accounts, the WTO has been an enormous success, and it has provided and begun to implement the appropriate infrastructure for the massive treaty results of the Uruguay Round of multilateral negotiations (1986–94). The WTO has the unparalleled responsibility of overseeing a treaty of some thirty-thousand pages, including approximately one thousand pages of dense and often ambiguous treaty text. (The remainder largely comprises schedules of concessions regarding goods and services.) However, increasing concerns have arisen about the direction and the long-term viability and strength of the WTO, particularly during the last year or two, accentuated by the failure of the 1999 Third Ministerial Conference in Seattle.1 A central feature of the WTO is its dispute settlement mechanism. Indeed, the statesmen involved in the Uruguay Round, as well as current WTO officials and ambassadors, take considerable pride in this feature. The WTO dispute settlement system has had an enormous impact on the world trade system and trade diplomacy. It is unique in international law in its juridical and