4 - The EU-Led MPIA

Summary

As the EU seeks to continue reaping the benefits of multilateral trade and to restore and reform the WTO dispute settlement mechanism, Chapter 4 focuses on the EU-led alternative created for the appellate stage: the Multi-Party Interim Appeal Arbitration Arrangement (MPIA), which ensures that its parties can continue using the two-stage WTO dispute settlement mechanism without panel reports being sent into the void by regular appeals. The chapter introduces the pertinent WTO rules and the MPIA and assesses the arrangement’s compliance with the former. To ensure that the MPIA can indeed live up to EU’s ambition to ensure assertive enforcement of multilateral trade rights, it evaluates whether the MPIA is likely to provide security, predictability, and high-quality rewards while also helping to unlock the WTO dispute settlement crisis. Then, the chapter assesses whether the MPIA could be blocked by an unwilling party, thereby jeopardizing the operation of the MPIA. Finally, to be able to weigh in on the ability of the MPIA to contribute to solving the crisis or rather to undermine the WTO multilateral system, it considers the MPIA’s broader geopolitical implications.