Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in the WTO

The article analyzes the complex relationship between the legal regime of international human rights law, particularly under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), and the system of the World Trade Organization (WTO). In the first part, the author addresses this issue from a normative perspective and seeks to answer whether the WTO is bound by the ICESCR and if the Covenant can be applied in WTO dispute settlement to justify violations of WTO law. In the second part the author empirically analyzes the extent of the use of human rights arguments in the debates of WTO bodies, using the documents of the WTO database. In the conclusions the author presents the results of his inquiry