GATT documents

On 15 May 2006 the General Council decided to make public all official documents issued under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Many of these documents did not exist electronically, and have been scanned to create a digital archive.

To search specifically for GATT official documents, go to the Documents online GATT Official Documents research gate.

This work is in progress — you can now search by document symbol, date, collection and full-text. Cataloguing "Document Type" is not yet completed and the data store will continue to be updated progressively. You can refine your search by using the "Full text search criteria" field.

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Browse by symbol 

GATT documents are identified by a “symbol” or code which is based on either the issuing body or subject matter of the document. Unlike WTO document symbols, GATT symbols are not hierarchical.

A B C D E F G H I J K L   
M N O P Q R S T U V W XYZ 1-7

Documents for which no link appears are not available electronically
  

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Browse by date 

  

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Browse all documents 

To do this you need to download the catalogue file part 1 (5MB), part 2 (5MB), part 3 (5MB), part 4 (5MB), part 5 (5MB). You can then use the local search function of your browser to search within titles/symbols by typing Ctrl-F and entering your search term.
  

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Other sources of GATT documents 

  • Stanford University Library scanned much of the GATT collection and makes the documents available through their website with a search engine.

Document formats
Documents exist in:

PDF scan — image only
What you see on your screen or printout is simply a scanned image of the paper document.

PDF scan with OCR
In addition to the scanned image this type of PDF file contains text which is searchable. This is a useful addition, but the text recognition is imperfect, so what you see and print is still the scanned image of the paper document.

Paper versions of all official GATT documents can be consulted occasionally with prior request to WTO Archives