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Webinar: WTO vs. Policy Space: New Report Shows Trade Organization Rarely Allows Countries to Use Exceptions, so What’s the Fix?

Presentation of New Paper Showing WTO Has Only Allowed two of 48 Attempts to Defend Domestic Policies Via Health, Environmental Exceptions; Panel Will Join Authors in Discussion of How Non-Commercial Policy Goals Can Be Better Safeguarded

For Immediate Release: February 1, 2022
Matthew Groch (202) 454-5111, mgroch@citizen.org

REPORT RELEASE WEBINAR

WHAT: A webinar presentation of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch’s new report, WTO General Exceptions: Trade Law’s Faulty Ivory Tower followed by a roundtable with international law and policy experts. This new analysis of WTO case decisions reveals that countries rarely succeed in attempts to use the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) exceptions to safeguard policies challenged as WTO violations even though the affirmative defenses ostensibly were designed to provide nations with policy space to pursue health, environmental and other goals. Absent changes to WTO rules, the global trade regime’s viability and legitimacy will continue to fade as governments prioritize addressing the major challenges of our times from climate crisis and the harmful rise of digital mega-corporations to extreme inequality and the threat of an endless pandemic.

WHO: Lori Wallach, Rethink Trade, Director

Daniel Rangel, Rethink Trade, Research Director and lead author

Jane Kelsey, University of Auckland Faculty of Law, Professor Emeritus

Alvaro Santos, Georgetown University Law Center, Professor of Law and Center for the Advancement of the Rule of Law in the Americas (CAROLA) Faculty Director

Melanie Foley, Public Citizen, Global Trade Watch International Campaigns Director (Moderator)

WHERE: Zoom – Participants can register HERE.

WHEN: Friday, Feb. 4 at 2 p.m. E.T.

 

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