Research On The Deadlock Of The WTO Appellate Body

On 11 December 2019,the Appellate Body of the World Trade Organization was suspended because there are no sufficient number of judges.This is the first suspension of the Appellate Body since its establishment 25 years ago and also a very serious crisis for the WTO.The suspension of the Appellate Body was due to the extensive obstruction by the United States in selection of judges of Appellate body,Which resulted in the number of judges no longer meeting the minimum requirements for hearing of cases.In fact,America's discontent with the Appellate Body has long been rooted,and in 2016,when Obama was still in power,the United States attacked WTO dispute resolution mechanisms.Since Trump became president of the United States in 2017,his extremely believe in "American supremacy" doctrine.Besides,the American trade representative,Robert Lighthizer,who is directly connected to WTO affairs,has hated WTO for a long time.A series of factors have led to the United States' attacks to WTO and until the 10 December of 2019,two of the three remaining judges in the Appellate Body had arrived for office,leaving only one Chinese judge,Zhao Hong.Robert Lighthizer has even publicly argued that cases in the GATT model are handled great because in such cases the parties to the dispute have the initiative to negotiate,which disclosed their purpose on destroying the Appellate Body and restoring the world trade environment to GATT times.How to destroy the Appellate Body,it may starts from the operation mode and the election system of judges of the Appellate body.There are seven judges in the Appellate Body,each serving for a four-year term and they can be reappointed twice.Once the term of office expires,the election of new Appellate Body members begins.The United States' approach to attacking the Appellate Body is that the selection of each Appellate Body member requires consensus among all Member States,and the United States,as one of the Member States,rejects the adoption or re-election of any of the members until the majority of the members of the Appellate Body expires,which eventually leads to a vacancy of judge in Appellate Body.Appellate bodies have made a significant contribution to the maintenance of a stable multilateral trading system and to ensuring fair and just world trade environment.As the last line of defence for a dispute settlement mechanism,once the Appellate Body has been suspended for too long,member States will lose confidence in the dispute settlement mechanism and even the WTO system,and the world trade environment may return to the era of the jungle law that the United States aspires toThis paper introduces the important role and historical status of WTO and the Appellate Body,analyzes the reasons for the suspension of the Appellate Body in procedural and theoretical terms,including both the problems and defects of the Appellate Body itself and the obstruction to the operation of the Appellate Body in the United States.In the third chapter,this paper analyzes the trend of international trade dispute settlement after the suspension of the Appellate Body,and lists the various efforts made by countries to deal with the crisis of the suspension.In the fourth chapter of this paper,the author puts forward some suggestions on how to deal with this deadlock for our country,and analyzes the feasibility of these suggestions.In the conclusion part,the author calls for countries to join hands and work together to restore the functioning of the suspended appellate body,to maintain the stability of the multilateral trading system and to prevent the world from returning GATT "the law of the jungle".