The ‘Human Rights Approach’ Advocated by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and by the International Labour Organization: Is It Relevant for WTO Law and Policy?

Abstract

This chapter claims that the contemporary worldwide recognition of human rights requires taking the ‘external challenges’ to the legitimacy and efficiency of World Trade Organization (WTO) rules and WTO negotiations more seriously than this is done in intergovernmental WTO bargaining among trade experts on the more than twenty ‘technical’ agenda items of the Doha Development Round. As the traditional safeguards of ‘input legitimacy’ and ‘output-legitimacy’ are not mentioned in WTO law, parliamentarians and public opinion rightly question the legitimacy of producer-driven WTO negotiations. The flexibility of WTO rules renders conflicts with human rights most unlikely. Greater openness of the WTO to non-governmental organization (NGOs) could help to reduce existing ‘information asymmetries’ in democratic Opinion markets' and in trade policy-making. Just as parliamentary meetings and most UN meetings are public and observed by NGOs, so public access to WTO meetings would not prevent legitimate confidentiality of intergovernmental negotiations.