Legal Lssues On Conflicts And Coordination Of Jurisdiction Among Dispute Settlement Mechanisms Of Multinational Economical Organizations

Article 24 of GATT1994 brings double identities to most WTO members while they are also the member states of regional trade organizations. However, disputes settlement mechanisms of these regional agreements do not connected to disputes settlement procedure in WTO involuntarily. The goal of setting regional economic communities is to reinforce business cooperation among member states, thus facilitating circulation of resources and capitals. In this sense, all the agreements formulated by regional legislative institutions shall be obeyed by their contracting members.We see many rights and obligations of regional agreements which are partly or exactly duplicate with WTO agreements, for instance, a discriminate custom tariff would violate both regional and multilateral regulations, thus making positive conflict between regional and world trade tribunals.This thesis tries to discover complex economic incentives and legal issues and illustrate conflicts and harmonization between regional and world trade systems. Part I will give a general overview of different types of regional trade agreements and local clauses relating to coordinate jurisdiction conflicts with WTO tribunal, the most important regional agreements like EC, NAFTA, MERCOSUR will be discussed in details in order to show inner relationship between the degree of harmonization of these organization and their jurisdiction conflicts clauses.Part II will review the compulsory power in jurisdiction of WTO tribunals and DSB case law, to show that at present, DSB penals try to skirte round this overlapping problem to sustain the continuity and predictability of DSB jurisdiction, this attitude may be changed in the near future as development of highly controversial trade cases.Part III focuses on regional trade communities,the motivation of resorting to regional tribunals and the ways of forum shopping by states will be analyzed. The positive effect of regional approaches shall not be ignored.A line of reasoning of solving overlapping jurisdiction will be given in Part IV, a comparison between regional and world system will be made, finally, advocating competition of these two systems seems convincing as the conclusion of this thesis.