Common Contracts

Abstract

May 20th, 2006

• Filed
  May 20th, 2006

One view of obligations under the WTO Agreement is that they are bilateral, that is, they involve legal obligations between two countries. This is premised on the idea that the object of WTO obligations is ‘trade’. According to this view, the WTO Agreement can be considered a ‘bundle of bilateral relations’ and WTO obligations should be analysed pursuant to rules concerning bilateral obligations under the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties and the Articles on State Responsibility. This article takes a different position. It posits that WTO obligations are more appropriately regarded as collective because their principal object is the protection of collective expectations about the trade-related behaviour of governments. These form a common interest over and above the interests of WTO Member States individually. At the same time, while expectations may be the treaty’s primary concern, they are not its sole concern. The treaty gives some flexibility to governments to deal with situ