Tag Archives: World Trade Organization

Why the WTO Should Tackle Border Corruption

Posted on by
Reply

When a state systematically fails to suppress bribery in its customs service, should that be an actionable violation of international trade law? More broadly, to what extent do anticorruption provisions have a place in the law of the World Trade Organization? In a 2014 post on this blog, Colette van der Ven squarely addressed these questions and concluded that the answer is no: the WTO, in her view, is not well suited to handling complaints of corruption.

I disagree with Colette’s well-reasoned analysis. While she is right to point out substantial challenges to grappling with anticorruption through the WTO, these challenges are surmountable—and the importance of a WTO remedy counsels in favor of surmounting them. Continue reading →

Post-TPP Withdrawal: Loss of a Trade-Corruption Milestone?

Posted on by
1

As promised, President Trump removed the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement soon after he took office in January. The move withdrew the world’s leading economy from the largest regional trade deal ever proposed. It also represented a major step back from what looked like a breakthrough in linking anticorruption and trade. As I discussed in a previous post, the TPP’s anticorruption chapter was an important step towards inclusion of anticorruption commitments in trade deals, making the U.S. withdrawal from the TPP a step backwards for the decades-old movement to incorporate anticorruption provisions in trade agreements.

Yet Trump’s move was not the end of the TPP negotiations. Nor should it be the end of championing an increased role for anticorruption and transparency in trade deals. With the TPP having reached the final stages of negotiation, its Transparency and Anticorruption Chapter can provide an outline for future trade deals that might provide further opportunities for trade-corruption linkage. As outlined in a previous post, the TPP’s chapter on anticorruption made several strides forward, including obligations to join UNCAC and respect other anticorruption instruments. What’s more, the anticorruption provisions were to be made enforceable in trade dispute resolution tribunals (though, as Danielle has previously written, corruption can already support certain actions in trade dispute arbitration). Looking at the strides forward in the draft TPP, there are three key avenues through which the Transparency and Anticorruption Chapter can continue to strengthen international trade deals.

Continue reading →

A Trade-Anticorruption Breakthrough?: The Trans-Pacific Partnership’s Transparency and Anticorruption Chapter

Posted on by
16

The full text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), released earlier this month, is already generating plenty of discussion. One of the proposed agreement’s most striking features is the full chapter on transparency and anticorruption, Chapter 26. The U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) had earlier stated that its objectives in negotiating the TPP included addressing transparency, accountability, and corruption; at the time I thought this was simply a negotiating ploy or marketing strategy, but it looks like I was wrong. As USTR’s summary of the “good governance” steps of Chapter 26 correctly notes, the TPP “includes the strongest anti-corruption and transparency standards of any trade agreement.” Indeed, Chapter 26–which appears to modeled in part on draft language that Transparency International had proposed for inclusion in a different trade deal, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership–could mark an important and unprecedented step towards using trade agreements to promoting and harmonize international anticorruption efforts.

Here are a few points that are or could be particularly important features of Chapter 26:

Continue reading →

How the WTO’s Trade Facilitiation Agreement May Reduce Bribery

Posted on by
Reply

I argued in my last post that the WTO is not well-suited to directly addressing bribery and corruption; even though bribery impedes trade, it would be a mistake to recognize bribery (or failure to suppress bribery) as an actionable violation of international trade law. But that does not mean the WTO should not take action to deal — indirectly — with the problem of corruption. A good example of productive measures the WTO can implement to reduce the impact of bribery and corruption in trade is the Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA), which was negotiated in December 2013 (but has not yet entered into force).  The TFA aims to reduce transactional obstacles to trade, focusing mainly on border transactions; in doing so, it may indirectly address some of the most significant contributors to bribery in international trade, even though the TFA is not about corruption as such. The agreement provides a nice example of how the WTO system can take positive steps to combat corruption, even though the system is not equipped to tackle corruption directly.

The TFA has the potential to contribute to reducing trade-related bribery in three main ways.

Continue reading →

Should the WTO Outlaw Transnational Bribery?

Posted on by
Reply

Unlike other international organizations, the World Trade Organization (WTO) has not passed measures that directly address transnational bribery. This is the case despite the fact that transnational bribery significantly harms international trade. Almost 20 years ago, then-U.S. Trade Representative Mickey Kantor described corruption as a “barrier to trade” and advocated more action on corruption through the WTO system. Although those proposals went nowhere at the time, prominent scholars continue to make a strong case in favor of using the WTO to directly address matters of bribery and corruption, either by passing provisions that directly outlaw bribery or requiring WTO Member States to sign a declaration against corruption.

Continue reading →