“I was very sorry to hear the news that Ambassador Julio Lacarte-Muró has passed away,” DG Azevêdo said.  “He was a remarkable man, diplomat, and adjudicator, with a unique place in the history of global trade cooperation.  He will be very much missed in the trade community. My thoughts and sympathies are with his friends and family.”

Mr Lacarte's story is also the story of the multilateral trading system. He took part in the first session in 1946 of the Preparatory Committee tasked with drawing up a charter for the proposed International Trade Organization (ITO), and participated in the 1947 Havana Conference. Of course, the ITO never came into being, but it was substituted by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which provided the rules for much of world trade for the following 50 years.

Mr Lacarte later helped launch the Uruguay Round, which eventually led to the establishment of the WTO in 1995. He served as Chairman of the Uruguay Round negotiating group on dispute settlement, and the text of the Dispute Settlement Understanding was negotiated and agreed under his leadership. Having served as a key architect of the WTO dispute settlement system, Mr Lacarte was appointed as one of the original seven Appellate Body members, and then elected the first Chairman of that body, a position which he held for two years. Mr Lacarte thus planted the seeds for a dispute settlement system which now enjoys tremendous confidence among WTO members as a fair, effective and efficient mechanism to solve trade problems.

In addition to serving as his country's Representative to the GATT and United Nations organisations in Geneva, Mr Lacarte was also Uruguay's ambassador to Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, the European Common Market, Germany, Japan and the United States of America, and concurrent Ambassador to India and Thailand.

Mr Lacarte was a respected and popular figure at the WTO, and has a conference room, “Sala Julio Lacarte”, named in his honour.