The Legal Study Of Using WTO Dispute Settlement System To Resolve Regional Trade Agreements Disputes

With the Deepening globalization of the world economy, countries are actively joiningin the trend of international trade, in which the international trade law system providesan important guarantee for the development of global trade; however, the internationaltrade law system’s own problem gradually emerges. The two most importantinternational trading law systems, namely, the WTO system and the RTAs systems, havethe problem of imbalance between its legislative and judicial body. Within the WTOsystem, with the deadlocked Doha Round of negotiations, a new agreement under theWTO system can not be reached in a short term and this makes it can not meet the needsof its Member. Besides, when the WTO dispute settlement system tries to solveemerging new disputes among members, it may step into judicial activism. From theperspective of judicial, after decades of development, WTO system has formed a sound,relatively independent and quasi-judicial dispute settlement system. On contrary, in theRTAs system, due to stagnated legislation in WTO, countries have turned to RTAs topursue free trade and RTAs legislation develops very fast. However, as opposed withWTO system, despite the provisions of the dispute settlement in some RTAs, thesedispute settlement systems has not been favored by RTA members. What’s more, thereare no sound dispute settlement systems in most RTAs. Based on the above background,combing with some scholars’ ideas, this paper puts forward the opinion of using theWTO dispute settlement system to resolve RTAs dispute.This paper first briefly introduces WTO and RTAs system and their dispute settlementsystem, and then analyzes the necessity and feasibility of using WTO dispute settlementsystem resolving RTAs disputes. After that, this paper puts forward the way of usingWTO dispute settlement system resolving RTAs disputes and finally analyzes thedevelopment trend of the international trade law system. The point of this article is thatthe relationship between the WTO and RTAs is not competing but complementary. Thispaper’s proposal makes the WTO dispute settlement system break the limitation of theexisting WTO laws and reverse the imbalance legislative and judicial situation ininternational trade law system. At the same time, the proposal makes the RTAs disputescan be solved by a quasi-judicial system, including appellate review. More importantly,the WTO system and RTAs system is no longer independent between each other. Thisproposal put the two systems’ respective advantages together, adding interactionbetween the two systems. Through a shared dispute settlement system, and theintroduction of both “horizontal” and “vertical” consistency in disputes settlement, thepath is set for a unified global trade dispute settlement system.