The EU and the Multi-Party Interim Appeal Arbitration Arrangement (MPIA) - A Contingency Tool to Save the WTO Appellate Stage

Since May 2016 , the United States of America has been vetoing the selection of the members of the Appellate Body of the World Trade Organization (WTO), alleging procedural and substantive criticisms on the activity of the Standing Tri-bunal . Consequently, at midnight of 10 December 2019 the World Trade Court ceased to be operational, as only Zhao Hong, the Chinese judge, remained in of-fice . Not even the latter AB member was spared by the US administration: in fact, in March 2020, Ambassador Shea claimed before the Dispute Settlement Body (DSB) that Ms Zhao, being a paid affiliate of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) Government, was not a valid member of the Appellate Body . The doubts raised by US diplomacy did not, however, need to be considered, as Washington kept its veto on the appointment of the appellate adjudicators, and, on November 30, 2020, also the Chinese judge’s mandate expired . Faced with such an unprecedented WTO institutional crisis , the European Union (EU) has chosen to be a major actor in the reform process of the WTO appellate review mechanism. Beyond presenting important institutional proposals to amend Article 17 of the Understanding on Rules and Procedures Governing the Settlement of Disputes (DSU) ,which have been highly considered in the draft decision on the functioning of the Appellate Body presented in late 2019 by the WTO Facilitator Ambassador Walker , the EU launched a very interesting tempo-rary solution to preserve appeals in Geneva, the Multi-Party Interim Appeal Arbi-tration Arrangement (MPIA) , which is based on the autonomous alternative dis-pute settlement means already referred to in Article 25 of the DSU. Subsequent to the presentation of the stand-alone procedure foreseen in the latter provision, our work analyses how the EU suggested, developed, and pro-gressively gained support for its MPIA project within the WTO community, illus-trating the main aspects of the temporary alternative appeals arbitration mecha-nism and taking into consideration the objections the US raised against some as-pects of the important interim appeal arbitration procedure .