United States—Origin Marking Requirement, WT/DS597/R

Abstract

For almost seventy years, parties to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) did not use multilateral dispute resolutionmechanisms to address questions relating to the interpretation of security exceptions.1 The United States—Origin Marking Requirement (Hong Kong, China) (U.S.—Origin Marking Requirement) Panel Report,2 which is the latest addition to the limited but expanding WTO jurisprudence in this area, shows the growing importance of security exceptions in WTO law.3 It is a highly politicized dispute in which the separate customs territory of Hong Kong, China invoked the multilateral dispute mechanism of the WTO for the second time since it joined the WTO as a founding member in 1995 and since it became a contracting party to the 1947 GATT in 1986. Notably, theU.S.—Origin Marking Requirement ruling is the only panel report issued in proceedings with Hong Kong as the disputing party.4 Against the backdrop of the U.S.-China trade war, this important decision tests the limits of the WTO’s architecture and has implications for its future relevance. The origins of the dispute can be traced to July 14, 2020, when President Donald J. Trump issued the Executive Order on Hong Kong Normalization. Following a determination that Hong Kong was no longer sufficiently autonomous to justify differential treatment in relation to China, this executive order suspended the application of Section 201(a) of the United States-Hong Kong Policy Act of 1992, which had previously granted Hong Kong special