Session III: Issues Concerning Enforcement and Dispute Resolution (Antony Taubman)

Abstract

Thank you very much to everyone. I won’t consume my time with all my thanks. It’s great to be here. I’m lucky to be part of this panel, and I will try to build on the two previous presentations. Two important caveats, though, picking up from Sean. Of course, we don’t interpret treaty language, we organize a system whereby panel members and then the appellate body themselves clarify the terms, but I would just opportunistically make one quibble with what Sean said: I think one of the strengths of dispute settlement in the WTO is the institutional gravitas, the consistency, the coherence, the idea that it is a coherent system that is coherently managed. Okay, I am a bureaucrat, so nothing I say—in fact if you can discern any coherent view from what I’m saying, don’t attribute it to the WTO or to the Secretary or to the Members. I’m not going to talk about the law, or the interpretation of the law, so much as the ideas behind the law. It’s very rare that I’m let loose in a law faculty so I’m going to talk rather abstractedly, partly as a bureaucratic defense but also because I think there are some very interesting abstract ideas that come up in this discussion about dispute settlement that are worth thinking about. The idea of a TRIPS Agreement—we’re still debating what are those “trade related aspects” of intellectual property rights. I like to say, essentially TRIPS reframed the international law of intellectual property by saying that indeed, IP is trade-related. In other words, when there are trade negotiations, when there are trade disputes, when there are trade relations generally, IP is on the table, is on the agenda. And that’s the transformation that we’re seeing washing through the system, not merely multilaterally, but in the RTAs and the bilateral agreements, too, that we’ve been talking about. And behind this is this essential idea of what is adequate and effective protection of IP arts—and let’s just hang onto that concept.