From Turkey - Textiles to Peru - Additional Duty: The Contribution of the WTO Case-Law on the Relation between the Marrakesh System and Regional Trade Agreements

While the World Trade Organization (WTO) system is the pillar of international trade, its difficulties to deepen and widen the multilateral trade discipline to meet the growing needs of a constantly more interconnected, sophisticated and articulated world economy have provoked the negotiations of many Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs), in particular of mega-deals or mega-regionals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), or the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP). The case-law, in particular, the WTO case-law, concerning the relations between WTO and RTAs systems becomes thus essential to provide for a clearer legal picture on the interaction of universal and regional trade rules, and so endow with a certain level of predictability the economic operators, stakeholders and civil society, and, more generally, all the interested and involved international actors. Such a contribution of clarity is nowadays particularly precious, because of the already emphasized unprecedented proliferation of RTAs having WTO Members as Contracting Parties. The present article hence intends to analyze the existing WTO case-law on the topic, after a brief presentation of the state-of-the-art of the WTO discipline and practice concerning RTAs. In fact, in spite of being really few, the WTO reports have already fixed some important principles also on the relation between treaty-systems, suggesting how to harmoniously combine the WTO and RTAs substantive and institutional-procedural rules through the application of the international customary rules for treaty interpretation, as indicated by Article 3, para. 2 of the Understanding on Rules and Procedures Governing the Settlement of Disputes (DSU).