Research On The Legitimacy Of Intemational Reserve Allowance Program Under The WTO Framework And Proposals On China’s Responses

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, With the further increase of global warming and the continuance of natural disasters,unprecedentedly,environmental issues has became the Sword of Damocles hanging upon human’s heads. Although the international community faces to climate change actively and has acquired principle and initial results,due to the divergent positions resulted by different interests and demands of the developed and developing countries,the critical issue about the Allowance of responsibility for emission reductions has not been solved up to now. With the expiration of the Kyoto Protocol, the new round of global Allowance of responsibility for emission reductions will be re-shuffle.In this context, in June2009, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the"Clean Energy and Security Act",which proposed a greenhouse gas regulation based on total restriction of trading. This regulation is not only for domestic enterprises, but also on imported products,the latter is exactly the so-called International Reserve Allowance Program.This program requires the covered imprted products purchasing and submitting a certain number of quotas to get the authorization to enter U.S. customs territory since January1,2020.In consideration of the multilateral trading system requires that the member country’s trade control measures should be consistent with WTO rules, the legitimacy under the WTO framework of this system which will be absolutely terrible for developing countries especially China, is very worthy of discussing.This paper is composed of five parts:the first part concerns about International Reserve Allowance Program in the context of conflict between environmental protection and trade freedom, firstly introduces the background, main contents and design purposes of the program,and also gives a brief analysis of its characteristics, and then turns to the conflict between environmental protection and free trade, and analyzes the root causes of conflict, which leads to the second part about the International Reserve Allowance Program and the multilateral trade system; the second part begins with the position of WTO about environmental protection,followed by suggests the joint report of the WTO and UNEP can not be used as the legal basis of the International Reserve Allowance Program,finally emphasises on that the International Reserve Allowance Program should comply with the rules of WTO, which leads to the third and fourth part of the analysis;the third part focus on consistency between the International Reserve Allowance Program and the GATT general obligations,and get a negative conclusion which leads to the fourth part;the forth part concerns about whether the International Reserve Allowance Program can meets demand of the subarticle and forword of Article XX of GATT,so that examines whether the system can meet the conditions for exemption of the general exceptions provisions of the GATT;the fifth part gives suggests on what China should do to deal with the U.S. International Reserve Allowance Program.