The U.S. urged fellow World Trade Organization (WTO) members to voluntarily increase transparency in the dispute settlement process, in a long statement delivered during the July 22 meeting of the WTO Dispute Settlement Body (DSB).
The issue of transparency is "critical for the legitimacy of the WTO," the U.S. said. It urged other members to follow the lead taken by the it, European Union (EU), Australia, Japan and others and voluntarily make their dispute settlement hearings and submissions public.
Nothing in WTO rules prevents members from increasing dispute settlement transparency, so "members cannot defend the lack of transparency on this basis," the U.S. remarked.
"The continued lack of transparency is simply untenable and threatens to further erode public support for and, ultimately the viability of, this system that members profess to support," the U.S. concluded. It pressed fellow members to "immediately take steps in each dispute in which it is participating to request to make its statements publicly observable and to make its written submissions publicly available."
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