Study On The NAFTA Dispute Settlement Systems

The dispute settlement mechanism of the international economic organization has extremely important positions, which concerns survival or perish of its whole system. Operation, value, development in practice, appraise of the dispute settlement mechanism of North America free trade area attract people's attention, this text carries on overall analysis to above-mentioned problems by the theories, such as example analysis theory, law value theory, legal economics theory, comparative analysis, etc.. The dispute settlement mechanism of North America free trade area springs from dispute solution of international law and the domestic law, and it is application and development of the international dispute solution.North America free trade area was set up with NAFTA and two side agreements as legal foundation. These agreements have 6 sets of dispute settlement mechanism in fact. NAFTA chapter 11 is designed to resolve investor-state disputes over property rights; Chapter 14 creates special provisions for handling disputes in the financial sector via the Chapter 20 dispute settlement procedure; Chapter 19 establishes a review mechanism to determine whether final anti-dumping and countervailing duty decisions made in domestic courts are consistent with national laws; and Chapter 20 provides government-to-government mechanism to resolve high-level disputes. In addition, the NAFTA partners created interstate dispute mechanisms regarding domestic environmental and labor laws under the North American Agreement on Environmental Cooperation and the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation, respectively. The dispute settlement mechanisms set up to different problems are favorable to the settlement of the dispute, but these mechanisms often have a potential procedure conflict because they aren't coordinated.Characteristic analysis of these mechanisms includes their run organization, procedure and practice. North America free trade area does not set up special dispute settlement body (DSB), but all agreements set up own management organization, which are the Free Trade Commission, the Commission for Labor Cooperation, the Commission for Environment Cooperation respectively. Operation system of every mechanism has nothing in common with each other too, The author expounds the main legal questions to all system separately, such as terms suitable to apply, characteristic, etc.. Taking several relevant typical cases as an example, Practice analysis mainly proves every dispute settlement mechanism how to use concrete regulation, how to explain the concrete clause. In practice, every mechanism can generally solve various kinds of disputes effectively, but expose some questions, which make some disputes still unable to solve.On the basis of analysis to law value of system, every mechanism realizes the goal of its law value with just procedure and balanced interests. The dispute settlement mechanism of Free Trade Area of North America accords with 5 basic principles of just procedure basically, but it has some questions to exist. The dispute settlement mechanism doesn't distinguish merits but balances each side's interests and safeguards the authority of the multilateral system. Through the analysis to legal economics of the system, the author thinks the dispute settlement mechanism is the request of trade expense theory. Every member in the organization is unavoidable to produce dispute, which means market of right resource is twisted, and that it has to be corrected only by the contentious procedure at this moment. The mechanism ensures the stability of the organization and the abidance of the system, which will make the economic income of the whole system increase, and make each side realize expected interests and avoid expected damage. So the dispute settlement mechanism strives to unify between fair and efficiency.Compared to the WTO dispute settlement mechanism, we can see the dispute settlement mechanism of North America free trade area has its own characteristics. The dispute settlement mechanism of free trade area...