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\"The national treatment obligation prohibits discrimination between foreign goods, services and service suppliers and domestic goods, services and service suppliers. Begin Box Under the national treatment obligation, WTO Member Agricola may not treat chocolate from Industria less favourably than it treats its domestic chocolate, once the chocolate from Industria has entered the Agricolan market. Neither may Agricola treat Industrian coffeehouses established in Agricola less favourably than Agricolan coffeehouses. End Box\"-- Provided by publisher.

Technical standards are increasingly determining the development, production, trade in and marketing of goods and services. In order to ensure that technical regulations and product standards which vary from country to country do not create unnecessary obstacles to trade the Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade was adopted during the Uruguay Round. It is paralleled by the Agreement on Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures which sets out the basic rules on how governments can apply food safety as well as animal and plant health measures without, however, using them as an excuse for protecting domestic producers. Prominent decisions under the WTO Dispute Settlement have interpreted those provisions. This volume gives a detailed account of the necessary parameters for technical standards and measures seeking to protect health and environment. Included are commentaries on Articles III, XI and XX of GATT 1994 which are equally relevant in this context. The article by article commentaries draw from a considerable body of case law, the work by the TBT and SPS Committee and the relevant legal literature. Attention is given to substantive requirements as well as the necessary standard setting procedures. Apart from a thorough analysis of the relevant and most recent jurisprudence including the Biotech Panel Report the commentary seeks to give answers to newly emerging issues, such as special needs of developing countries. It is an indispensable tool for practitioners and academics working in this field of WTO law.

The Evolution of the Trade Regime offers a comprehensive political-economic history of the development of the world's multilateral trade institutions, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and its successor, the World Trade Organization (WTO). While other books confine themselves to describing contemporary GATT/WTO legal rules or analyzing their economic logic, this is the first to explain the logic and development behind these rules. The book begins by examining the institutions' rules, principles, practices, and norms from their genesis in the early postwar period to the present. It evaluates the extent to which changes in these institutional attributes have helped maintain or rebuild domestic constituencies for open markets. The book considers these questions by looking at the political, legal, and economic foundations of the trade regime from many angles. The authors conclude that throughout most of GATT/WTO history, power politics fundamentally shaped the creation and evolution of the GATT/WTO system. Yet in recent years, many aspects of the trade regime have failed to keep pace with shifts in underlying material interests and ideas, and the challenges presented by expanding membership and preferential trade agreements.

\"Constitutionalism is in crisis. And the crisis unfolds not only on a national or a regional level. It is a global phenomenon: Democracy is no longer on the rise, the Rule of Law appears weakened, political cohesion seems to erode. Human Rights Protection finds itself questioned, International Criminal Law struggles for broad recognition, international trade may have lost some of its appeal. Institutional actors find their authority questioned, established political parties are threatened by ever-changing popular movements. But where to does the charted road lead? How will the \"Crisis of Constitutionalism\" unfold in the years to come? Nobody knows, of course. But at the same time: Nobody is too keen to make an educated guess either. This volume remedies that. By giving nine eminent scholars in law and political science the opportunity to make their predictions, where the constitutionalist project will stand ten years from now, it creates a forum of deliberation that will not only aim at anticipating the developments in question but at the same time shape academic discourse on constitutionalism alongside it\"-- Provided by publisher.

When is a design just a design, and when is it a trademark? Over the last several decades, courts have developed a clear framework for evaluating the distinctiveness of certain unconventional marks, especially those typically conceived of as \"trade dress.\" The Supreme Court has drawn a line between product packaging, on the one hand, and product design, on the other. Packaging features are treated just like any other potential trademark in the sense that we protect them automatically if they are inherently distinctive, and we require evidence of secondary meaning if they aren't. Product design is different. Like color, it is incapable of being inherently distinctive and can be protected only when it has acquired secondary meaning. There's just one problem with this fundamental rule: It isn't true. Or at least, it isn't the whole truth. As we show in this article, sometimes courts and the Trademark Office don't recognize features like logos as being part of a product's design, and as a result, they ignore the categorization system and evaluate the claimed features for inherent distinctiveness. Something similar happens with certain product packaging features, except in reverse. In other words, courts are engaged in a previously unrecognized \"step zero\" before they classify trade dress features and apply the normal rules of distinctiveness for product packaging and product configuration. In that largely implicit step, courts and trademark examiners make their own judgments about the role of that feature, and particularly whether they believe consumers are likely to regard those features as trademarks. While courts and the Trademark Office have been slow to articulate rules for step zero - or even to acknowledge that it exists - we show in this article that in practice they are recognizing what we call \"trademark spaces\": locations that consumers are likely to assume are serving as trademarks. When they apply this implicit step zero, courts and the Trademark Office frequently treat the location of a claimed feature on the product or package as an important determinant of trademark status. As we describe in detail, some locations are special. Use in those spaces goes a long way to convincing a court or trademark examiner that the design is a trademark. The recognition of trademark spaces offers a way to rationalize the step zero analysis and to begin thinking more systematically about the relationship between distinctiveness and use as a mark. Courts can and should evaluate use in a trademark space as part of the broader step zero inquiry. But they should do so explicitly and based on evidence, not instinct. Bringing step zero out into the open will help us better understand when and why consumers react to certain designs as trademarks. And it will pave the way for us to reject claims to own things that either do not or should not function as trademarks.

p class=\"MsoNormal\"span style=\"font-size:10.0pt;line-height:107%;font-family: \"AdvOTecfccdcf_I\",sans-serif;mso-bidi-font-family:AdvOTecfccdcf_I\"The global rise of digital trade has shifted economic inequalities, narrowing gaps in some regions while exacerbating disparities between Africa and more digitally advanced areas. The massive dominance of Big Techs in digital markets has concentrated economic bene/spanspan style=\"font-size:10.0pt;line-height: 107%;font-family:AdvOTecfccdcf_I+fb;mso-bidi-font-family:AdvOTecfccdcf_I+fb\"fi/spanspan style=\"font-size:10.0pt;line-height:107%;font-family:\"AdvOTecfccdcf_I\",sans-serif; mso-bidi-font-family:AdvOTecfccdcf_I\"ts among a few large players, often bypassing local African /spanspan style=\"font-size:10.0pt;line-height:107%;font-family: AdvOTecfccdcf_I+fb;mso-bidi-font-family:AdvOTecfccdcf_I+fb\"fi/spanspan style=\"font-size:10.0pt;line-height:107%;font-family:\"AdvOTecfccdcf_I\",sans-serif; mso-bidi-font-family:AdvOTecfccdcf_I\"rms. The AfricanContinental Free TradeArea (AfCFTA) aims to enhance intra-African trade to foster economic growth with its newly adopted AfCFTA Protocol on Digital Trade focusing on integrating African digital markets. However, without careful regulation, this integration risks deepening existing disparities. Given that Big Techs/spanspan style=\"font-size:10.0pt;line-height:107%;font-family:\"AdvOTecfccdcf.I+20\",sans-serif; mso-bidi-font-family:\"AdvOTecfccdcf\\.I+20\"\"’ /spanspan style=\"font-size: 10.0pt;line-height:107%;font-family:\"AdvOTecfccdcf_I\",sans-serif;mso-bidi-font-family: AdvOTecfccdcf_I\"dominance is a key driver of these imbalances, I explore how the AfCFTA/spanspan style=\"font-size:10.0pt;line-height:107%;font-family: \"AdvOTecfccdcf.I+20\",sans-serif;mso-bidi-font-family:\"AdvOTecfccdcf\\.I+20\"\"’/spanspan style=\"font-size:10.0pt;line-height:107%;font-family:\"AdvOTecfccdcf_I\",sans-serif; mso-bidi-font-family:AdvOTecfccdcf_I\"s Competition Protocol can be leveraged to navigate them. The Competition Protocol, with its multilayered approach to competition regulation, o/spanspan style=\"font-size:10.0pt;line-height:107%; font-family:AdvOTecfccdcf_I+fb;mso-bidi-font-family:AdvOTecfccdcf_I+fb\"ff/spanspan style=\"font-size:10.0pt;line-height:107%;font-family:\"AdvOTecfccdcf_I\",sans-serif; mso-bidi-font-family:AdvOTecfccdcf_I\"ers a framework for ensuring digital trade fosters equitable economic development across Africa. It tackles anti-competitive conduct in cases with a continental dimension, such as the abuse of economic dependence by gatekeepers, mandates support for regional and national authorities through technical assistance and capacity-building, and promotes cooperation and coordinated enforcement between all three jurisdictional levels. While not a complete solution, the Protocol represents a signi/spanspan style=\"font-size:10.0pt; line-height:107%;font-family:AdvOTecfccdcf_I+fb;mso-bidi-font-family:AdvOTecfccdcf_I+fb\"fi/spanspan style=\"font-size:10.0pt;line-height:107%;font-family:\"AdvOTecfccdcf_I\",sans-serif; mso-bidi-font-family:AdvOTecfccdcf_I\"cant step toward ensuring Africa/spanspan style=\"font-size:10.0pt;line-height:107%;font-family:\"AdvOTecfccdcf.I+20\",sans-serif; mso-bidi-font-family:\"AdvOTecfccdcf\\.I+20\"\"’/spanspan style=\"font-size: 10.0pt;line-height:107%;font-family:\"AdvOTecfccdcf_I\",sans-serif;mso-bidi-font-family: AdvOTecfccdcf_I\"s digital market integration promotes equitable development./span o:p/o:p

\"Full text of the lecture published in August 2011 in the Recueil des cours, Vol. 349 (2010)\"--P. [2].

A future multilateral investment court (MIC) or multilateral appellate mechanism (MAM) will operate on a plurilateral basis, among States that become parties to the tribunal's constitutive instrument and grant it jurisdiction over disputes under their investment treaties. The creation of a MIC or MAM would involve a significant strengthening and centralization of dispute settlement institutions in the investment treaty regime, which is already overly dependent on law-development by adjudicators, reflected in well-established concerns about loss of State control. Thus, a key challenge in designing a MIC or MAM is to incorporate appropriate control mechanisms that will enable State input, without unduly undermining a MIC or MAM's independence. This article analyses control mechanisms in a MIC or MAM, considering a wide range of questions of institutional design. It highlights two fundamental tensions. One is the tension between independence and accountability. The other tension is between procedural multilateralism and substantive bilateralism. While the procedural law in a MIC or MAM will have been multilateralized, the substantive law the tribunal will interpret and apply will remain contained in mostly bilateral investment treaties, controlled by the parties to those agreements. This article addresses the challenges of designing a multilateral tribunal for a regime that lacks multilateral substantive law and contributes to wider debates over striking an appropriate balance between international judicial independence and Member State control.