Hey Putin, get ready to be sued
A former top judge at the World Trade Organization, James Bacchus, is warning that Russia wants to join the world body, but not necessarily to obey its rules: Putin has likened the prolonged WTO accession process to an “ambush” of Russian economic interests. Evidently, he wants Russia to be able to enjoy the benefits without ...
A former top judge at the World Trade Organization, James Bacchus, is warning that Russia wants to join the world body, but not necessarily to obey its rules:
A former top judge at the World Trade Organization, James Bacchus, is warning that Russia wants to join the world body, but not necessarily to obey its rules:
Putin has likened the prolonged WTO accession process to an “ambush” of Russian economic interests. Evidently, he wants Russia to be able to enjoy the benefits without bearing the burdens of being in the WTO. He seeks the tariff concessions and the safeguards against trade discrimination that come with WTO membership, but he does not seem to want WTO commitments to impede unduly on his continued ability to impose the whims of what often seems an arbitrary rule.
As Bacchus points out, a key question is whether the WTO will change Russia more than the reverse. He thinks the U.S. is betting on the former and has accordingly been willing to wait on many concrete concessions from Moscow:
The vast majority of Russia’s myriad of obstacles to foreign trade and investment will… remain. For a variety of diplomatic reasons unrelated to trade, the United States in particular seems to have decided to wait and try to resolve many intellectual property, agriculture, and other trade grievances with the Russians in WTO dispute settlement instead of compelling concessions in the required terms of Russia’s accession agreement with the WTO.
As we have seen elsewhere, WTO rules can indeed, over time, help pry open closed economies and closed societies. But this U.S. strategy will work only if, as a WTO Member, Russia chooses to honor its treaty commitments on trade by respecting the international rule of law.
There’s no doubt that Russia’s accession will be a major test for the WTO’s dispute resolution system. Once Moscow’s in, the United States, the EU, and others keen to access its services market will no doubt flood the system with complaints about Russia’s conduct and compliance with its committments. Bacchus is right to be concerned about how Russia’s current political leadership will react to that wave of litigation. Pity the Russian official who has to brief Vladimir Putin on WTO lawsuits.
David Bosco is a professor at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies. He is the author of The Poseidon Project: The Struggle to Govern the World’s Oceans. Twitter: @multilateralist
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