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Geboye Desta, Melaku --- "GATT/WTO Law and International Standards: An Example of Soft Law Instruments Hardening Up?" [2012] ELECD 635; in Bjorklund, K. Andrea; Reinisch, August (eds), "International Investment Law and Soft Law" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2012)

Book Title: International Investment Law and Soft Law

Editor(s): Bjorklund, K. Andrea; Reinisch, August

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781781003213

Section: Chapter 7

Section Title: GATT/WTO Law and International Standards: An Example of Soft Law Instruments Hardening Up?

Author(s): Geboye Desta, Melaku

Number of pages: 44

Extract:

7. GATT/WTO law and international
standards: an example of soft law
instruments hardening up?
Melaku Geboye Desta*

I. INTRODUCTION

The World Trade Organization (WTO) has its roots in the General
Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), an international agreement that
was designed to facilitate international trade in goods by progressively
reducing and, in many cases, eliminating national governmental measures
that are restrictive of trade, which traditionally almost always meant
import-restrictive measures. The GATT/WTO system has succeeded in
reducing import tariffs in particular to such low levels that non-tariff
measures have now become the major remaining obstacles to international
trade.1 This is a result of two interrelated developments: (1) with the
reduction of tariffs, governments tend to resort to new non-tariff barriers
in order to keep a certain level of protection in place,2 while (2) the
successful tariff reductions also have the effect of exposing old non-tariff
barriers, appropriately compared by Kahler to the `draining of a lake that



* I wish to thank the editors of this volume, Andrea Bjorklund and August
Reinisch, for their patience, understanding and encouragement throughout. I am
also grateful to my colleagues in Dundee in general for taking an active part at a
staff seminar where I presented the paper, and Abba Kolo, Alistair Rieu-Clarke,
Moshe Hirsch, Aloysius Gng and Vitaliy Pogoretskyy for helpful comments and
suggestions on the draft. All errors of course remain my own.
1
Technical barriers have long been recognized as `the largest ...