Clearing the fog: Forest Stewardship Council labelling and the World Trade Organization

Du, Ming

doi:10.1111/reel.12373

Clearing the fog: Forest Stewardship Council labelling and the World Trade Organization

Du, Ming

Authors

Professor Ming Du ming.du@durham.ac.uk
Professor

Abstract

This article aims to clarify three long-standing puzzles concerning the place of private standards in the World Trade Organization (WTO) through the lens of FSC labelling. The first question is whether the FSC label falls within the regulatory scope of the Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT Agreement). The second question is the extent of WTO member States’ obligations under the TBT Agreement if the FSC is an active standardizing body in their territories. The third question asks whether the FSC standard may qualify as an ‘international standard’ as defined in the TBT Agreement and thus may exert quasi-legislative effects on WTO members’ national forest conservation laws and regulations. A detailed case study of the relationship between the FSC labelling and the TBT Agreement shows that the answers to these questions are much more nuanced than the existing scholarship suggests.

Citation

Du, M. (2021). Clearing the fog: Forest Stewardship Council labelling and the World Trade Organization. Review of European, Comparative & International Environmental Law, 30(1), 81-94. https://doi.org/10.1111/reel.12373

Journal Article Type	Article
Acceptance Date	Oct 19, 2020
Online Publication Date	Nov 10, 2020
Publication Date	Apr 17, 2021
Deposit Date	Oct 21, 2020
Publicly Available Date	Nov 10, 2022
Journal	Review of European, Comparative & International Environmental Law
Publisher	Wiley
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	30
Issue	1
Pages	81-94
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1111/reel.12373

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Copyright Statement
This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Clearing the fog: Forest Stewardship Council labelling and the World Trade Organization, which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1111/reel.12373. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Use of Self-Archived Versions.