International Organizations in wto Dispute Settlement: How Much Institutional Sensitivity?

摘要

In the aftermath of World War Ⅱ, a new global international order gradually emerged that has been characterised by the increasing interdependence of States and the need to address global issues in a more centralised fashion. In that context, we have witnessed the rise of the international organization, an institution designed to functionally administer these issues of global interest and, as a consequence, constitute the source of new norms. More recently, several scholars have perceived this increase in norm creation through international organizations as a possible source of erosion of general international law and as a threat to legal security in a phenomenon that has been described as 'fragmentation;' namely, the incoherence between different regulatory areas and the absence of any central authority to administer and aggregate these inconsistencies. The World Trade Organization (wto), in particular, has attracted a lot of attention in the context of this debate, given its compulsory and rather 'strong' dispute settlement system in conjunction with the unwillingness of the said dispute settlement system to take into account non-wto related norms when resolving a dispute.