Moral Determinations in International Law: Lessons from the Seals Dispute

International Economic Law and Policy Working Group

In this webinar Dr Ben Czapnik (Chinese University, Hong Kong) will present his research on the WTO Seals Dispute.

Professor Lorand Bartels (Cambridge) will act as discussant. Dr Luca Rubini (Bham) will moderate.

Join us on Zoom on 18 October

While GATT Article XX(a) permits WTO Members to implement trade-restrictive measures for moral purposes, it also permits dispute tribunals to review the consistency of those measures with WTO law. In the moral disputes to date, WTO tribunals have managed a delicate balancing act by pragmatically addressing the parties' concerns while avoiding perceptions that they are second-guessing the moral choices of sovereign Members. However, this pragmatic approach has left some critical questions unanswered:

• What does the concept of "public morals" entail? 
• What analytical methods are available to establish the existence of public morals?
• Are non-rationalist measures covered by the moral exception?

In this session, Dr Czapnik argues that WTO law has failed to clearly resolve these issues and that the WTO's public morals jurisprudence is ambiguous and equivocal. These issues came to the fore in the Seals dispute where there are competing academic views about the EU's underlying policy objective: was the seal products ban a rationalist animal welfare measure inspired by welfarist philosophy or did the EU offer special protection to seals because of their "cuteness" and the "moral feelings" they invoke among EU citizens?