8 - Conflict of norms in WTO dispute settlement

Summary

If the WTO is to become a vehicle for global governance one thing has to be clear: this vehicle ought not travel without a road map, and should be mindful of other traffic.

The case study used throughout this book has been the law of the WTO. When examining the hierarchy of sources of international law (chapter 3), the concepts of accumulation and conflict of norms (chapter 4) and the available conflict-avoidance techniques (chapter 5), we have made reference to the particular situation in the WTO as well as to the case law developed under WTO dispute settlement. When it comes then to resolving conflicts of norms, be they inherent normative conflicts (chapter 6) or conflicts in the applicable law (chapter 7), we also used conflicts involving WTO norms, including internal WTO conflicts, as the standard example. A major missing link that remains, however, is to see how the ideas developed in previous chapters play out in the concrete setting of WTO dispute settlement. The main tenet of this book has been to portray WTO law as part of the wider corpus of public international law, with which it may either accumulate or conflict, and which it may either prevail over or have to give way to.