The years 2020 and 2021 will go down in history as the time when the COVID-19 pandemic caused the deepest recession of the century and killed and sickened many millions of people. Yet trade geeks might remember those years as the period during which gigantic advances were made in women’s leadership and influence on trade policies and trade systems. A woman took the helm of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development for the first time and a woman was once again appointed to lead the International Trade Centre. Also remarkably, after a slow start, a WTO Informal Working Group (IWG) on Trade and Gender was finally established in late 2020 (as the next step from the Joint Declaration on Trade and Women’s Economic Empowerment of 2017). This chapter leans and builds on the author’s previous work and provides an update on the IWG’s work and the engagement of WTO members (Friends of Gender) interested in contributing to that work. Based on limited information available, the chapter gauges how much of the IWG’s work programme has permeated into general WTO operations. In other words, it assesses (based on a text search) the degree to which the ongoing negotiations of trade rules/structural discussions on joint statement initiatives – investment facilitation, e-commerce, and micro, small, and medium enterprises – have taken a gendered lens. It also reports on the advances achieved in mainstreaming gender in the WTO Secretariat and membership representation in the WTO.

With gender and trade now linked on the international agenda, gender approaches in regional trade agreements (RTAs) could have significant implications for women entrepreneurs and traders around the world. Building on the foundation of African Regional Economic Communities (RECs), the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) includes gender as an express priority alongside sustainable and inclusive socio-economic development. Yet this is only a starting point. A gender-focused AfCFTA protocol is under negotiation, representing a significant opportunity to reassess RTA provisions on gender and consider more tailored, contextual approaches that could benefit women on the African continent and around the world. This chapter will present a comparative assessment of approaches for evaluating and categorizing gender and trade approaches in RTAs. These include a focus on gender responsiveness and incorporation of international and domestic legal design options for ‘inclusive law and regulation’ in order to use RTAs to address more holistically the concrete challenges facing women. The chapter also includes a contextual analysis of how trade rules could more actively support women’s work, reduce procedural hurdles in the market, enhance access to finance and digital inclusion, and promote food security under the AfCFTA and future RTAs.

This chapter describes why the World Trade Organization (WTO) has proven such a great challenge for the representation of women and women’s interests. Some progress has been made since the Aid-for-Trade programme, which cooperates with the WTO, incorporated gender mainstreaming in 2011. This includes the adoption of the 2017 Joint Declaration on Trade and Women’s Economic Empowerment and the inauguration of the WTO Gender Research Hub in 2021. Nevertheless, to date the WTO has lagged behind other international organizations, including organizations of global economic governance, in representing women and their interests. The chapter posits the following reasons in historical context: (i) Women did not ‘get in on the ground floor’ at the WTO; (ii) The locus of power at the WTO rests with the members (exemplified by the requirement for consensus and the ’single undertaking’, the importance of member proposals, and the institutional weakness of the Secretariat); (iii) The relative lateness and weakness of WTO involvement with civil society, compared to other institutions of global economic governance; (iv) The formative clashes during the 1980s and 1990s between gender and trade activism and trade liberalization; (v) The lex specialis nature of the WTO dispute settlement system; (vi) The WTO is primarily a ‘hard-law’ institution.

The PRC appears to hold the Joint Declaration which it does treat as a valid treaty to have become fully executed, meaning that all its terms have been performed. Hong Kong has been handed over and much of the substance of the document is to be found in its first annex (Annex I) which is – and the PRC emphasises this aspect – entitled an ‘Elaboration by the Government of the People's Republic of China of its basic policies regarding Hong Kong’. The UK takes a different view, treating as substantive treaty commitments the PRC’s (own) elaboration of Chinese policies in the third paragraph and in Annex I. The roots of this controversy run deep and have their origin in the treaty negotiations.

Chapter 6 traces the trajectory of a renewed consciousness of the rule of law and various freedoms in the final decade of colonial rule and unpacks the geopolitical concerns and motivations of the British government in de-silencing Hong Kong before the handover in 1997. The conclusion in 1984 of negotiations between Britain and China on the reversion of Hong Kong’s sovereignty to the latter marked the opening of an era of liberalistic rule of law and individual freedoms in Hong Kong. Laws and regulations that had been used to suppress free speech, control publication and prosecute political protesters were loosened or repealed one after another in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Hong Kong’s first statute expressly recognising freedom of speech, assembly and association was passed only in 1991, just six years before the colonial era came to an end. Not only were laws and senior judicial appointments liberalised in the last decade of British rule, but the 1980s and 1990s also witnessed unprecedented levels of public discussion of, and official and media narratives on, the importance of free speech and the rule of law to Hong Kong.

This chapter provides an overview of the system of governance in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR). It introduces readers to the fundamental concepts of ‘one country, two systems’ and ‘high degree of autonomy’ under the Basic Law, which provide the framework for the allocation and exercise of responsibilities over Hong Kong by the central authorities and the Hong Kong government. Within the sphere of Hong Kong’s autonomy, the Basic Law provides for the exercise of governmental powers by three arms of government: the executive, the legislature and the judiciary. The powers and functions of these three arms are outlined in this chapter, together with discussion of the doctrine of ‘separation of powers’.