With lower tariffs, the application of non-tariff measures to limit imports (Malouche and Cadot 2012) is of increasing concern. Technical barriers to trade (CTOs), which include standards, technical regulations and compliance assessment procedures1, are among the non-tariff measures that have increased significantly over the past decade. During the period 2005-2017, an average of 1,400 OBT measures per year were reported to the WTO, compared to an average of 625 for the period 1995-2005. This increase in OBT measures has been accompanied by an increase in the number of specific trade problems expressed by WTO OBT Committee members since 2005, from 128 in 2005 to 548 in 2017. The WTO Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade (the OTC Agreement) establishes rules and procedures for the development, adoption and application of voluntary product standards, mandatory technical rules and procedures (e.g. B tests or certifications) to determine whether a particular product meets these standards or standards. The aim of the TBT agreement is to prevent the use of technical requirements as unnecessary barriers to trade. Most ATRs also have their own dispute settlement procedures and, to the extent that the OBT provisions of the RTA are (or are similar) in accordance with the provisions of the WTO OBT agreement, the risk of duplication and conflicting decisions between the WTO and dispute settlement mechanisms (DSM) is latent. Such overlap, often referred to as judicial overlap, can occur when litigation can be brought to the DSM RTA and the DSM WTO (Marceau, 2015 and Marceau and Wyatt, 2010), and this can occur when the dispute, if it is a provision under the RTA and the WTO agreement, is the same (or similar). This overlap can in turn lead to a conflict of decisions when the WTO member submits the dispute to the DSM RTA (under RTA law) and the WTO DSM (under WTO law) and obtains conflicting or contradictory decisions. The proliferation of regional trade agreements (“ATRs”) requires all WTO members to assess the extent to which ATRs deviate from the fundamental principles of the WTO. B such as the Most Favoured Nation (MFN) at THE GATT and, in particular, the WTO agreement on technical barriers to trade. This paper focuses on the technical provisions relating to trade barriers (OTCs) in RTAs concluded by the United States, the European Union, Australia and Singapore and finds that these CTA provisions complement the existing disciplines of the OTC agreement.
To the extent that the provisions of the CTA contained in the ATRs may be inconsistent with the OTC agreement, this paper examines the extent to which they may be justified under Article XXIV of the GATT. This paper concludes that the ambiguity of the key concepts of GATT Article XXIV allows WTO members to fully interpret the scope of GATT Article XXIV. Introduction to WTO rules on technical barriers to trade and understanding of the OTC agreement The growing importance of TBT measures is also reflected in the content of regional trade agreements. Approximately 77% of ATRs contain at least one provision for OBT measures and, since 2010, the inclusion of these provisions in ATRs has been systematic (McDaniels et al., 2018). The provisions of the RTA relating to OBTS today include, among other things, the development and application of standards, technical regulations, compliance assessment, but also transparency, equivalence, harmonization and regulatory cooperation; while some ATRs contain these provisions in the form of isolated articles, others, including the most recent ones, have a specific section or chapter on technical barriers to trade. The WTO agreement has inspired much of the content of the RTA in this area, so most RTAs on OBTS tend to comply with the provisions of the WTO-OBT agreement, while few of them go beyond them (Molina and Khoroshavina, 2015).