Механизми за правотворчеството в Световната търговска организация: вземане на решения
Mechanisms of Law-making in the World Trade Organization: decision-making by the organs

Summary/Abstract: The article presents a partial structural analysis of law-making processes in the World Trade Organization from international-legal-theory point of view. The analysis takes into consideration the international legal person status explicitly conferred the WTO by its constitutive treaty; such a status enables it to perform its own independent law-making activity, different from that of member- states. The analysis ranges over the treaty provisions of the 1994 Marrakesh Agreement Establishing the WTO and the practice adopted by the member-states. It is asserted that one can identify particular law-making mechanisms in the WTO. They all depend on the subject that performs them, the lawmaking method and the type of the international legal act taken. As far as law-making methods are associated with the different legal nature, substance and effect of the international legal acts, it may be presumed that each law-making mechanism aims at creating a special type of act or norm. This is important for the member-states and their governments as they should determine whether the created international legal act needs to be provided with legal effect in the internal law sphere as well as the way this should be achieved. Participants in these mechanisms may be member-states in their individual capacity together with the organization itself as an international legal subject through its governing bodies. The analysis demonstrates that decision-making could be viewed as an activity performed by the WTO governing bodies rather than by the member-states themselves, as the traditional view will have it. Decision making could, therefore, be regarded as an institutional law- making method of “consensual legislative” nature. Decision-making by the governing bodies is used in many of the law-making mechanisms of the organization. In some cases it could be a self-operating mechanism producing a final international legal act. In other cases it is combined in complex mechanisms with the direct contractual law-making method used by the member-states.

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