WTO 紛爭解決體制에 관한 硏究

Abstract

Established in January 1st, 1995 with a goal to set a new order in world trade, World Trade Organization (WTO) has today secured a position as the 'UN in international trade,' with 149 member countries and 32 observer countries as of December 11th, 2005. Since its establishment, WTO has taken various measures to build a free and fair trade order. Especially, from the procedural point of view, WTO allowed its Dispute Settlement Body (DSB) to settle all trade disputes among the member countries under the Understanding on Rules and Procedures Governing the Settlement of Dispute (DSU), denying the settlement of disputes based on unilateral retaliation. Accordingly, the member countries must use and comply with the rules and procedures of DSU in rectifying and settling infringement on an agreement under WTO system, infringement or nullification of benefits under mutual agreements, or obstacle in achieving the goal of such agreements. This means that DSU has expressly stipulated multilateralism in dispute settlement. In other words, DSU is a stipulation of a political promise made by all countries to execute a multilateral dispute settlement procedure. It is also an epoch-making merit of WTO's dispute settlement system. Not withstanding the above, the dispute settlement procedure under WTO system is subjected to the agreements among member countries whose interests conflict, and thus it cannot be absolute or perfect for all countries. To make the dispute settlement procedure under DSU effective, the followings must be secured; first, panels must be operated without hesitation within the scheduled deadline; second, the selected panels' report and appeal report must be respected by the subject countries; and third, the subject countries must sincerely follow the recommendations or judgments of DSB to settle the dispute under mutual agreement rather than retaliation. If the recommendations or judgments of DSB are not respected by the subject countries, infringement on the agreement will continue, and the appealing country will choose to execute unilateral retaliation rather than settle the dispute under the rules and procedures of DSU. Such continuous infringement and unilateral retaliation will cause a trade war to damage or even ruin the multi-trading system, and in the end, all countries will suffer from such damage. With such recognition, this study analyzes and reviews the dispute settlement system of WTO, and then extracts and analyzes the problems in the operation of DSU. Afterwards, it suggests an improvement measure to forecast the WTO system and provide legislative stableness. This improvement measure will be used as a theoretical data for the Korean government and companies to effectively correspond to trade disputes. As a preceding research to achieve the above objectives of this study, the dispute settlement system of WTO is summarized in Chapter 2. In Chapter 3, the detailed procedures of WTO's dispute settlement system are analyzed, such as the agreement procedure, panel procedure, appeal procedure and execution procedure. Then, as the main theme of this study, Chapter 4 discusses about the problems and future improvements of WTO's dispute settlement system based on the preceding cases of WTO, related rules of DSU, accumulated judgments of panels and the operational status of the dispute settlement procedure. Finally in Chapter 5, this study concludes by suggesting some points that should not be passed over during the discussion on the improvement for the problems found in WTO's dispute settlement system.