Bücher von Erich Vranes

In recent years, there has been a worldwide intensification in the use of investment screening mechanisms. This surge is connected with political re-orientations, the rise of new economic powers, and security concerns. Despite the considerable effects that investment screening may have on international investment and trade, there is hardly any literature examining the consequences to be drawn from relevant WTO rules for investment screening. However, the importance of WTO law for such instruments is substantial not least due to the broad scopes of application of the GATT and GATS agreements. The risk that screening activities could be challenged before the WTO is underlined by pertinent panel reports. This book in particular uses the 2019 EU Screening Regulation as an example for illustrating the relevance that WTO law has for investment screening. It concludes that in the light of relevant WTO rulings screening activities undertaken for public order and security reasons may face considerable hurdles not least in the general exceptions and security exceptions of the GATT and the GATS.

This book offers an in-depth analysis of the WTO security exceptions and relevant rulings by WTO dispute settlement panels. The WTO security exceptions are commonly regarded as the "box of Pandora" of the WTO system, since WTO Member States can invoke them in order to justify trade restrictions violating WTO law which they consider necessary for their essential security interests. The Members of the WTO and the GATT 1947 have hesitated for decades to rely on these security exceptions. In recent years, however, these clauses have been invoked for the first time in high-profile disputes involving Russia and Ukraine, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, as well as the US, China, the EU and other nations. This has been regarded as the turn of an era in view of the risk that the security exceptions could be instrumentalized to undermine the WTO and the international economic governance system more generally. This study therefore thoroughly analyses the WTO panel reports issued in these landmark cases. It also explains the geopolitical relevance of the increasing invocation of security clauses and argues that the legally and methodologically sound application of the WTO security exceptions, which have often been regarded as "self-judging" provisions, requires a proportionality analysis encompassing tests of the suitability and necessity of the trade measures to be justified under these truly exceptional clauses.