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Article
The Place of Human Rights Law in World Trade Organization Rules
Florida Journal of International Law (2004)
  • Stephen Joseph Powell, University of Florida
Abstract

WTO rules routinely are linked to the inability of nations to make meaningful progress in sharpening environmental and other human rights protections, for example, the failure of the 2002 Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development to usher in any new treaties despite the bright promise of the Rio Earth Summit of the previous decade. The common brief of environmental, medical, and development interest groups is that the market principles of supply and demand, comparative advantage, and non-discrimination on which global trade rules are built have encumbered pursuit by nations of fundamental non-economic objectives that must in any reasoned legal hierarchy hold higher societal priority than monetary matters.

Recalling that the logic and coherence of the WTO system—indeed its startling success in increasing world wealth—flow from a single-minded and relentless dedication to encouraging economic growth through the elimination of barriers to trade, the essay notes that, nonetheless, the Preamble to the Marrakesh Agreement Establishing the WTO does not make free trade an end in itself, but a means to fulfill basic human rights such as the improvement of global standards of living, promotion of sustainable development, and preservation of the environment. Moreover, GATT Article XX enumerates a series of public welfare policies, including shielding public morals, conserving exhaustible natural resources, and protecting human, animal, or plant life or health that WTO Members may pursue even if the trade restrictions that result would violate basic trade precepts. Other WTO Agreements act in concert with these provisions to take full account of “human rights” needs of Members and the Appellate Body has reached willingly to bring the corpus of public international law into the room with dispute settlement panels, thereby expanding the premises for addressing human rights.

In sum, this essay argues that the claim that the WTO is a barrier to implementation of human rights treaties is both inaccurate and premature, that in fact the WTO not only is far more than simply neutral as to human rights law, but that the trade body has made respectable progress in fitting the square norms of normative human rights law into the round holes of utilitarian trade rules, given the limited jurisdiction of trade negotiators, the recency of the WTO’s binding dispute settlement system, and the unsettled nature of the human rights law with which trade rules are most likely to intersect.

Keywords
  • WTO,
  • human rights,
  • trade rules structure,
  • public international law,
  • customary law,
  • GATT Exceptions,
  • natural resources,
  • precautionary principle,
  • sustainable development
Publication Date
Spring March 1, 2004
Citation Information
Stephen Joseph Powell. "The Place of Human Rights Law in World Trade Organization Rules" Florida Journal of International Law Vol. 16 Iss. 2 (2004)
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/stephen_powell/10/