The Rights Of Third Parties Of The WTO Dispute Settlement Procedures

The third-party system is very important in the WTO dispute settlement mechanism . Since China's accession to the WTO relatively late, the current domestic researches on the rights of the third parties are relatively few, and mainly confined to the DSU section 2,3,4 of article 10, on the interpretation. Some scholars introduced the rights of the third parties course of historical development, analysis, as well as of the existing problems, through which they put forward their own proposals. Of course, some scholars, on some of the provisions of the rights of the third parties, conducted in-depth researches, which are mainly based on the literature of the researches about the exercise of the right to participate in a third party to the WTO dispute settlement in cases. The third system is a very important system, so it is necessary to study.Many developed countries in the world, due to their relatively earlier join into the WTO than China, their researches on the rights of third parties are relatively advanced. Shown as in relevant statistics, the United States and the EU are the members who frequently make use of the dispute settlement mechanism, and the United States is the country who has taken part in the most dispute settlements as a third-party. Some American scholars claim to expand the rights of third parties in the practice of the dispute resolution, because the WTO is a system built on complex rules on the multilateral trade organization, and it is thus extremely difficult to form an agreement under such a framework, as a result, it is benefit to expand the rights of third parties for the Experts Group making the right decision and reducing litigation costs. Therefore, the study abroad of the rights of the third parties is mainly on how to effectively expand third party rights in the dispute settlement procedures.Comparison analysis and case analysis are the two main research methods in this paper. The first part is an overview on the rights of third parties, mainly covered the content of the rights of third parties during the times of GATT and WTO, and a comparison with the third person in domestic legal relationship, moreover the recommendations of increasing the rights of third parties in the Doha round. The second part, the central element of this paper, introduced the rights of third parties in the dispute settlement procedures, which can be roughly divided into four processes, namely the consultation process, the Expert Group process, appeal procedures, and the arbitral proceedings. Of the above four processes, the rights of third parties in the Expert Group process is the core of this part. The third part is on the practice of China taking part in dispute settlement procedures as a third party. First, preliminary statistics of China as a third party in the dispute settlement was made; then, the characteristics of China's practice were analyzed, so as to provide some advices on China's participation in the dispute settlement procedures, and make better use of third-party rights in dispute settlement, fight for more trade interests.