A Study On The Application Of Article 32 Of The Vienna Convention On The Law Of Treaties In WTO Treaty Interpretation

The World Trade Organization(WTO) is an organization mainly rely on rules(including treaties and agreements) to deal with International trade disputes. Without treaty interpretation there can be no possibility of treaty application, so treaty interpretation plays an important role in dispute settlement. “Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties” has significant importance of treaty interpretation. This paper intends to explore the application of Article 32 of the VCLT in existing WTO mechanisms, the author refers to 25 cases related to Article 32 of the VCLT in WTO disputes, analyzes WTO DSB1’s ideas and makes summary on the relation of Article 32 and Article 31 of the VCLT in WTO,the condition to apply supplementary and the standards to define whether the document is supplementary or not---relevance and common intention.