3 A. The World Trade Organization

From GATT (1947) to WTO (1995): the Uruguay Round's grand bargain — GATT's trade-in- goods discipline expanded into services (GATS), intellectual property (TRIPS), and dispute settlement with teeth (the Appellate Body — currently in crisis from blocked appointments: a live legal story). The principles (the law student's list):Most-Favoured-Nation (any concession to one member extends to all); national treatment (imports taxed no worse than domestic goods once inside); tariff bindings (ceilings committed); transparency; special and differentialtreatment for developing countries and LDCs (longer deadlines, the LDC duty-free initiatives); accession by negotiation. Functions: administer the agreements; negotiate rounds (Doha's long stall); adjudicate disputes (the panel–appellate process — trade law's supreme court, its case law the deepest body of international economic law); review members' policies. Nepal and theWTO:acceded 23 April 2004 — the first least-developed country to join through the fullaccession process (the LDC's milestone); the commitments: tariff bindings and bindings' cuts, services schedules, TRIPS transition (the pharmaceutical-patent flexibilities' LDC window — the public-health safeguard worth naming); the balance sheet (the honest close): market-access gains vs preference erosion (the EU's Everything-but-Arms benefit's dilution as members grant LDC access), the implementation burden on a thin trade bureaucracy, and the disciplines' discipline: customs and standards modernisation as accession's by-product.