Work on RTAs prior to the establishment of the Committee on RTAs
Until the establishment of the Committee on RTAs (CRTA), the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and later the WTO examined regional trade agreements in individual working parties. As of the entry into force of the WTO on 1 January 1995, 14 working parties of the GATT 1947 were in existence. By the time the CRTA was established in February 1996, 12 additional working parties had been established by either the Council for Trade in Goods or the Council for Trade in Services.
During the GATT years, regional trade agreements were examined in individual working parties, and reports on their examination were adopted by the GATT Council. For each new agreement notified to the Secretariat, a new working party was established.
From the creation of the WTO on 1 January 1995 until the establishment of the CRTA, the same procedures were applied. However, no report on the examination of an agreement was adopted by the relevant WTO body.
The establishment of the CRTA in February 1996 as the single body responsible for the examination of agreements helped streamline the examination process and provided a forum for the discussion of systemic issues relating to regional trade agreements and their relationship to the multilateral trading system.