Bilateral Agreements

B.2.1 EC — Poultry, para. 79   back to top
(WT/DS69/AB/R)

In our view, it is not necessary to have recourse to either Article 59.1 or Article 30.3 of the Vienna Convention, because the text of the WTO Agreement and the legal arrangements governing the transition from the GATT 1947 to the WTO resolve the issue of the relationship between Schedule LXXX and the Oilseeds Agreement in this case. Schedule LXXX is annexed to the Marrakesh Protocol to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade 1994 (the “Marrakesh Protocol”), and is an integral part of the GATT 1994. As such, it forms part of the multilateral obligations under the WTO Agreement. The Oilseeds Agreement, in contrast, is a bilateral agreement negotiated by the European Communities and Brazil under Article XXVIII of the GATT 1947, as part of the resolution of the dispute in EEC — Oilseeds. As such, the Oilseeds Agreement is not a “covered agreement” within the meaning of Articles 1 and 2 of the DSU. Nor is the Oilseeds Agreement part of the multilateral obligations accepted by Brazil and the European Communities pursuant to the WTO Agreement, which came into effect on 1 January 1995. The Oilseeds Agreement is not cited in any Annex to the WTO Agreement. Although the provisions of certain legal instruments that entered into force under the GATT 1947 were made part of the GATT 1994 pursuant to the language in Annex 1A incorporating the GATT 1994 into the WTO Agreement, the Oilseeds Agreement is not one of those legal instruments.
 

B.2.2 EC and certain member States — Large Civil Aircraft, paras. 1302–1304   back to top
(WT/DS316/AB/R)

… the … measures [at issue] fall within the category of government support to which Article 4 of the 1992 Agreement is addressed. The 1992 Agreement, however, does not address the remedies that each party could pursue at the multilateral level. …
 

At the other oral hearing, the European Union suggested that the 1992 Agreement delineated the “interests” of the United States in the area of government measures relating to the LCA industry and thereby limited the ability of the United States to assert claims of adverse effects to its interests under the SCM Agreement. … [We see no] basis for the argument that a bilateral agreement serves to limit the interests of the parties under a subsequent multilateral agreement.
 

The European Union also asserts that “the circumstance that these {challenged} measures were in conformity with an agreement between the parties is a fact that the Panel was required to take into consideration in assessing whether adverse effects exist”. … Even assuming for the sake of argument that such a “fact” was indeed relevant, the European Union does not explain why such fact would preclude the United States from making a claim of adverse effects under the SCM Agreement.