23 Sep China Invokes the “Public Morals” Defense!
I know you have all missed my blogging about international trade law. So now that I’m back (at least for a while), let me highlight a neat legal issue raised by China in its appeal of a recent WTO decision against its restrictions on foreign media. According to this WSJ report, China has raised the “public morals” defense contained in Article XIV of the General Agreement on Trade in Services to challenge a WTO panel report on Chinese restrictions on the distribution of foreign media within China. The public morals defense is a delight to academics, but it has been analyzed only once by the WTO Dispute Settlement Body, when the U.S. invoked it to justify its restrictions on internet gambling. This could be a fascinating case since it will probably necessitate a WTO panel considering distinctly non-liberal non-Western conceptions of public morals. Let a hundred law review articles bloom!
Julian,
The public morals exception was in fact already raised before the panel in DS363. However, the panel was not requested to look into the content of public morals, and it adroitly refrained from doing so, assuming that chinese “content review” qualified under the substance of the exception, and restricting its analysis to the question of necessity, on which basis the relevant measures were found to be inconsistent with the GATS. So, for better or for worse, the AB will most unlikely not be considering “non-liberal, non-Western conceptions of public morals”.
T.