Responsibility of the WTO for Breach of an International Obligation under the Draft Articles on Responsibility of International Organizations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Summary This article challenges the argument that the World Trade Organization (WTO) is devoid of executive or governing functions and, hence, immune from the regime set out in the International Law Commission’s 2011 Draft Articles on the Responsibility of International Organizations (RIO). A brief drafting history of the RIO, clarification of the terminology associated with matters of international responsibility, and two hypothetical examples illustrating the potential for WTO responsibility set the stage for the article’s main argument. The author examines the WTO’s nature by analyzing its constituent law, itssui generismandate and functions, its international legal personality, and its own use of terminology in presenting itself to the world. Critical analysis of RIO Articles 64 (onlex specialis) and 10 (on the existence of a breach of an international obligation), and their application to the WTO, completes the argument. The author thus refutes both the notions that (1) the WTO is exclusively member driven and, hence, not an executive, governing organization but asui generisentity and (2) the WTO is therefore unable to breach an international obligation and thus immune from the RIO regime. The article concludes that, while a breach by the WTO of an international obligation may be exceedingly rare, it nonetheless — as any international organization — comes within the ambit of the RIO regime. The WTO should therefore consider adjusting its internal rules accordingly.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.019 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".