Suchergebnisse

The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade contains many provisions dealing with non-Tariff barriers to international trade, but the most significant obligations imposed upon the contracting parties to the General Agreement are those set out in Part I, namely, the obligation to extend most-favoured-nation treatment to other contracting parties and the obligation to apply to imports from other contracting parties treatment "no less favourable than that provided for in the appropriate Part of the appropriate Schedule annexed to this Agreement" (Art. II :I (a)). There is annexed to the General Agreement a Schedule in respect of each contracting party, recording the tariff concessions which that party is obliged by Article II to extend to its GATT trading partners. These concessions are constantly being modified, however, and if the General Agreement is to record accurately the tariff obligations of the parties, the Schedules must keep up-to-date with these modifications. Unhappily, in the years following the provisional entry into force of the General Agreement, the Schedules became hopelessly outdated, caught up in a tangle of amending "protocols" and "certifications" to the point where they ceased to be useful either to the contracting parties or to the commercial community as a record of the tariff obligations of the parties. The present note describes the origin of the GATT schedule problem and the steps taken by the contracting partieas to resolve it and restore the Schedules to a useful function, an interesting exercise in the application of treaty law and procedures to the rather unusual amendment provisions of the General Agreement.