No place for the WTO in the EU legal order? : EU individuals as the victims of multilevel trade governance

Award date: 12 December 2011PDF of thesis uploaded from the Library digital archive of EUI PhD thesesSupervisor: Ernst-Ulrich PetersmannThis thesis examines how the EU legal order has adapted to the presence of the World Trade Organization. More specifically, it asks how the European Court of Justice has adapted its case-law on the application of international law within the EU legal order to the particular nature of the WTO system at the intersection of international law and international trade policy. Central to this question is the extent to which the Court has granted direct or indirect effect to provisions of the WTO Agreements and to decisions of the WTO Dispute Settlement Body. Despite almost 40 years of case-law, the effect of WTO law within the EU legal order remains highly relevant. This thesis argues that the ECJ‟s stance vis-à-vis WTO law increasingly inspires the ECJ‟s standard approach to deal with international law, that WTO law provides for a laboratory of more implicit techniques of dialogue between courts and that the EU‟s central focus on respect for the rule of law and fundamental rights urgently calls for a viable solution so as to reconcile the political interests of the EU in the global trading arena with the fundamental rights of private market players. Therefore, the thesis proposes four pathways in order to overcome the identified shortcomings. Particular attention is thereby devoted to the potential of certain developments introduced by the Lisbon Treaty to shed new light on sometimes completely frozen chapters in this long-standing debate