Chapter 5 is dedicated to the analysis of the amended EU Trade Enforcement Regulation 654/2014 to allow the imposition of unilateral countermeasures in case of appeals into the void in the WTO context or of an FTA party blocking panel proceedings. The chapter introduces the original Regulation, recent amendments, and their legislative history. It then appraises the legality of the amendments in light of WTO and FTA rules and whether general public international law on state responsibility could serve as the necessary legal basis for unilateral countermeasures. Assuming that the imposition of unilateral countermeasures under the amended Trade Enforcement Regulation would be in line with EU’s obligations, Chapter 5 also considers their compliance with the conditions established by general public international law. Finally, the amendments’ possible influence on and consequences for the multilateral trading system are explored in light of EU’s commitment to multilateralism and international law.

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.

International trade law is particularly prone to tensions with other areas of global governance given how trade rules interact with public policies addressing environmental and social problems linked to expanding economic activities. This chapter explores how the relations between international trade law and international environmental norms are construed as a matter of law, for example through in-text references to external norms in World Trade Organization (WTO) treaties, and as a matter of social practice, for example when parties make claims about norm relations in the context of WTO litigation, which can catalyse further norm contestation in other ‘fora’. Tracing these legal developments reveals how the international legal landscape can shift due to frictions between bodies of norms. More often than not, such shifts result in subtle adjustments of the relationships between bodies of norms in tension, leaving the substance of overlapping norms unchanged. In some instances, new norms emerge to regulate these interfaces, giving substance to actors’ expectations of how international trade rules should relate to other norms. In this authority game, advantageously negotiating interfaces between bodies of norms becomes increasingly important. The WTO has played this game rather successfully – to the frustration of environmentalists – by establishing strategic linkages on its own terms.

The settlement of high-level disputes concerning energy trade is a relatively novel phenomenon in the multilateral trading system, although their number is steadily growing. The emergence of such disputes has brought to the fore energy-related concepts not previously faced by WTO panels and the Appellate Body (AB). One crucial concept in this regard is energy security’. The goal of this chapter is to shed light on the emerging notion of energy security in international trade and WTO law. Taking a two-pronged approach, it starts by studying the meaning of the concept of energy security and its evolving role in international (trade) law, and then critically assesses how panels and the AB have dealt with energy security and the implications of this case law for its treatment in future disputes.

State backlash has marked dispute settlement mechanisms in both the international trade and investment treaty regimes. For the former, the transition from the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) dispute panels to the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) Dispute Settlement Mechanism (DSM) represented a notable instance of the turn toward international courts within world politics.

This chapter investigates and compares the attitudes that two different types of dispute settlement bodies dealing with international economic law – investment arbitration tribunals and the WTO Panels and Appellate Body – exhibit towards the decisions of other international adjudicators. Firstly, all the cases citing external precedents are mapped –employing citation and network analysis techniques – to identify the most cited courts and decisions and which issue areas prompt recourse to external precedent. Secondly, the author assesses the importance in identifying guiding precedents of factors such as: the legal regime, the factual matrix, the quality of the decision’s reasoning, and the reputation of the adjudicators that rendered it. Thirdly, he considers whether the invocation of external precedent might pursue goals going beyond the ones traditionally identified in the literature. Finally, the author compares the ways in which external precedent are currently employed by trade and investment adjudicators under a systemic perspective.