Bridges Weekly Trade News Digest • Volume 13 • Number 20 • 3rd June 2009
Ramírez, Van den Bossche Set to Become Next Appellate Body Judges
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Ricardo Ramírez Hernández of Mexico and Peter Van den Bossche of Belgium will likely fill two vacancies on the WTO’s Appellate Body, the organisation’s highest court, trade sources confirmed this week. The WTO’s 153 Member states are expected to finalise the selection of the two new judges at the next meeting of the Dispute Settlement Body, scheduled for 19 June.
Ricardo Ramírez Hernández, a former Mexican trade negotiator and now a lawyer at Chadbourne & Park, is slated to start his new job on 1 July. He will replace Luiz Olavo Baptista, a Brazilian lawyer, who left his post earlier this year.
Peter Van den Bossche is expected to fill a second vacancy after Italian law professor Giorgio Sacerdoti steps down at the end of this year. Now a professor of international economic law in the Netherlands, Van den Bossche has also served as a counsellor to the AB and as a consultant on WTO law to various national and international authorities. In 2001, he was named the acting director of the Appellate Body secretariat. Van den Bossche will take up his post as of 12 December.
Ramírez and Van den Bossche emerged as likely nominees from a competitive selection process that included candidates from Argentina, Brazil, Costa Rica and the Netherlands (see Bridges Weekly, 22 April 2009, http://ictsd.net/i/news/bridgesweekly/45429/). WTO custom dictates that one place on the high court be reserved for Latin America and one for the European Union, a norm that helps preserve a representative composition of the legal systems and geographical origins of the WTO’s Members.
The WTO’s Appellate Body is charged with conducting reviews of reports from WTO Dispute Settlement panels. Although Appellate Body judges do not represent individual governments, it is considered prestigious for a country to secure a nomination. Judges from China, Italy, Japan, the Philippines, South Africa and the United States currently sit on the court. Each judge serves a four-year term that can be renewed once.
ICTSD reporting.
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