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The leaked TTIP documents reveal that the EU and US are discussing the introduction of a detailed set of procedural requirements for the adoption of regulatory measures. Default provisions are set forth in the chapter on regulatory cooperation, applicable to goods and services. More specific provisions are being negotiated in the chapters on technical barriers to trade and on sanitary and phytosanitary measures. If they conflict with the regulatory cooperation chapter, they prevail.This article analyses the regulatory cooperation chapter insofar as it pertains to trade in goods but to the exclusion of SPS matters and anything provided in the TBT chapter itself. The questions this article examines are to what extent the TTIP proposals expand upon the obligations the two parties have already taken on under WTO law and to what extent the resulting regulatory coordination is consistent withWTO law. It will be shown that the US proposals on procedure may constrain substantive regulatory discretion beyond what applies under the GATT and TBT Agreement of the WTO. It will alsobe shown that the needs to conduct trade impact assessments and a detailed explanation of the necessity of measures anticipate a legal challenge to necessity and will provide information of much use to complainants in meeting their burden of proof.

The EC-Seal Products case raises a number of interesting issues for scholars researching in the broad area of risk regulation. This symposium addresses a selection of them through innovative, analytical contributions whose goals are to test central assumptions and question the logic of the findings and to bring fresh solutions to problems faced by the Appellate Body and the panel. In keeping with this analytical focus, this introduction to the symposium will not just present a summary of the key legal findings. Instead, it attempts to draw some further conclusions from the different contributions, to place the contributions in their broader legal context and to make connections between aspects (not) decided in Seals and scholarship on risk regulation, more generally.

GATT Article III:4 aims at equal treatment in respect of competitive opportunities of imports and competing domestic products by preventing protectionism. A key question is whether regulations with heavier burdens on imported products than on domestic products and a valid regulatory purpose are consistent with Article III:4. Inquiry into regulatory purpose under Article III:4 would allow by-passing Article XX whose list of regulatory objectives is a closed one and which puts the burden of proof on the defending WTO member. In EC-Seal Products, the Appellate Body has rejected any role for the regulatory purpose inquiry under Article III:4. This article shows why a purely empirical definition of likeness and less favourable treatment as disparate impact cannot logically lead to a finding of a violation of Article III:4. It then argues that regulatory purpose continues to play a role under Article III:4 because of the centrality of the notion of competition. It proposes to frame that competition as perfect competition. It shows that the adoption of perfect competition as the evaluative benchmark for all of Article III:4 makes better legal sense than starting from imperfect competition for the likeness analysis and perfect competition for the less favourable treatment standard, as is proposed in the literature. It also shows that even in case where imperfect competition is used as the sole benchmark for both parts of Article III:4, an assessment of how regulation interacts with competition continues to play some role.

AbstractEconomic globalization has created the possibility that human rights can be infringed abroad. The WTO, an engine of economic globalization, has remained surprisingly immune from human rights‐related complaints. I argue that its non‐violation or situation complaint, by invoking impediments to the attainment of treaty objectives, could provide for redress when WTO members interfere with the right to an adequate standard of living and the continuous improvement of living conditions abroad through trade in goods. The non‐violation and situation complaints reflect the shared but differentiated responsibility of WTO members for the human right to an adequate standard of living.