Transparency Principle in the Dispute Resolutions Chapters of the EU Free Trade Agreements in the WTO Practice Context

Transparency is nowadays one of the most debated topics in international economic law, including the sphere of international economic dispute resolution. This issue is under consideration both within the World Trade Organization and within the context of free trade agreement-making. The WTO Dispute Settlement Understanding (DSU) has a number of provisions on confidentiality, and the system of dispute resolution works usually according to these rules. In the recent WTO practice, however, certain steps have been done for enhancing the transparency in certain areas of the WTO dispute settlement framework: for example, although there are no provisions on amicus curiae briefs in the DSU, the WTO panels and the Appellate Body have found some solutions how to deal with such briefs in their practice. Another transparency issue is the possibility for general public to attend the hearings, which, in principle, is not provided in the DSU but which, nevertheless, has been the case in several disputes where parties agreed under certain conditions to a public procedure of the hearings. The widening use of regional trade agreements witnessed within the last few years has also led to the parallel widening of dispute settlement mechanisms included into these agreements. Many of them use the WTO model as a basis and use rules additional enhance transparency earlier unknown in the WTO frameworks. Interesting examples of this innovative approaches are some of the recent European Union free trade agreements. The analysis of transparency provisions in the EU FTAs dispute settlement chapters presented in this article features new perspectives for international economic dispute resolution.

About the author: Marina Trunk-Fyodorova – Ph.D. (Law), LL.M. (University of Connecticut), Associate Professor in the State and Administrative Law Department at St. Petersburg State University and in the Civil Procedure Department at Urals State Law University, Yekaterinburg, Russia.

Citation: Trunk-Fedorova M. (2016) Voprosy transparentnosti v polozheniyakh o razreshenii sporov soglasheniy o svobodnoy torgovle ES v kontekste praktiki VTO [Transparency Principle in the Dispute Resolutions Chapters of the EU Free Trade Agreements in the WTO Practice Context]. Mezhdunarodnoe pravosudie, no.1, pp.70–80. (In Russian).