Presenting International Trading Rules and the POPs Convention (1998)

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The purpose of this brief is to explain the relationship between the rules developed in the negotiations on persistent organic pollutants (POPs) and the rules of international trade by national governments in the late 1990s, to explain why appropriate trade measures can and should be included and why the supremacy clause should be eliminated from the POPs Convention. The following sections discuss the importance of the POPs negotiations and their relationship to the trade rules, provide a brief introduction to the structure of the WTO, and some background on the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade’s (GATT’s) core principles and environmental exceptions. They also provide a brief overview of the Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT Agreement) and the Agreement on Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (SPS Agreement) – two of the many independent agreements included in the Agreement Establishing the WTO (the WTO Agreement) that may be most relevant to POPs measures. Finally, this brief will discuss how these rules interact with possible trade-related measures in the future POPs Convention.

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