The architects of the post-war international economic order set out for the legal framework for liberal international trade underpinned by the GATT regime. Nonetheless, the East–West division necessitated a regime regulating trade between these two camps with the main objective to prevent strategic and technological articles transferred to the Soviet Bloc. Russia joins the Wassenaar Arrangement (the successor of COCOM) while China is still out. The market economy oriented GATT/WTO widens its membership and importantly accepted China in 2001 and Russia in 2012. Its diversified memberships make it a real ‘world trade organisation’ but at the same time introduce huge challenges for its governance, as manifested in the proliferation of national security exception. Whether the national security exceptions is ‘self-judging’ has been debated since the GATT era, but intensified in the past decade owing to the transformation of ‘negative consensus’ to ‘positive consensus’. The ‘self-judging’ debates of national security points to the underlying tension between sovereign as masters of treaties and adjudicator as treaty-interpreters.

In this chapter, it is argued that the deficiencies of the international human rights regime pose a difficult dilemma for individual states – when and how to respond to egregious human rights violations abroad. Being constrained by a few possible alternatives, individual states or groups of states increasingly rely upon coercive economic measures (unilateral economic sanctions) to remedy grave human rights violations. The legality of unilateral economic sanctions has been debated at length within the international community. Notwithstanding this, their consistency with public international law and more specifically, WTO law is still contestable. Against this backdrop, the chapter discusses the theoretical framework of the doctrine of Common Concern and its potential to discipline the use of coercive economic measures imposed on human rights grounds. It explores the ability of the emerging doctrine to provide a new legal framework and necessary thresholds to legitimize coercive economic measures as well as to restrict their use if they are politically motivated.