What WTO is and how it works

A treaty drafted as a stopgap

Fifteen governments began talking in December 1945 about cutting and binding customs tariffs, and the group had grown to 23 by the time the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade was signed at Geneva on 30 October 1947. The concessions took effect through a Protocol of Provisional Application by 30 June 1948, and the word provisional was meant literally. The institution was to be an International Trade Organization, whose charter was agreed at Havana in March 1948 and reached beyond trade into employment, commodity agreements, restrictive business practices and investment. Ratification failed in several legislatures, most consequentially in the United States Congress, and the charter never entered into force. What survived was the tariff agreement, administered by an interim commission for a body that was never built, and it ran that way for forty-seven years.

The Uruguay Round opened at Punta del Este in September 1986 and closed at Marrakesh, where the Marrakesh Agreement Establishing the World Trade Organization was done on 15 April 1994. It entered into force on 1 January 1995. The old text was not discarded but folded in as GATT 1994, which is why the obligations members argue over still carry article numbers written in 1947. Most favoured nation treatment is Article I. National treatment is Article III.

The treaty defines the word country

Article XII opens accession to "any State or separate customs territory possessing full autonomy in the conduct of its external commercial relations". An explanatory note at the end of the same agreement goes further, and says that the terms country and countries, wherever they appear in it, "are to be understood to include any separate customs territory Member of the WTO".

That note is why this roster reads unlike the other groups in the catalogue. Hong Kong and Macau are filed here as dependencies of China and both are members in their own names, listed by the organisation as Hong Kong, China and Macao, China; both had been GATT contracting parties before 1995 and carried the status across. Taiwan acceded on 1 January 2002 as the Separate Customs Territory of Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen and Matsu, and its record here carries disputed sovereignty. The European Union is a member beside its own member states, which are members individually as well. What membership tracks is the authority to set a tariff schedule and nothing else, so the sovereignty field on a country page and the roster on this one are answering two different questions.

Consensus, and one vote each

Article IX provides that the organisation continues the GATT practice of deciding by consensus, and that a matter which cannot be settled by consensus goes to a vote in which each member has one vote. The European Union casts as many votes as it has member states that are members themselves. The vote is almost never reached. A single member withholding consensus stops a decision, every member holds that, and the Ministerial Conference, which meets at least once every two years, is where it is tested in public.

The Doha Development Agenda was launched at the fourth Ministerial Conference on 14 November 2001 and has produced no concluded round. Two agreements have been finished separately since. The Trade Facilitation Agreement, on customs procedure, was adopted at Bali in December 2013 and entered into force on 22 February 2017 once two thirds of the membership had deposited instruments of acceptance. The Agreement on Fisheries Subsidies was adopted on 17 June 2022 and crossed the same threshold at a ceremony on 15 September 2025.

The appeal that goes nowhere

The Understanding on Rules and Procedures Governing the Settlement of Disputes is the part that binds without further agreement. A member can bring a complaint against another and have a panel appointed whether the respondent consents or not, and the panel report is adopted unless every member decides against adopting it. Panel reports can be appealed to the Appellate Body, a standing body of seven persons established in 1995 under Article 17 of that Understanding, three of whom are needed to hear an appeal.

Appointments to the Appellate Body are themselves made by consensus. From 2017 that consensus was withheld, vacancies went unfilled, and the terms of two of the three remaining members expired on 10 December 2019. The term of the last sitting member expired on 30 November 2020. A panel report appealed after that date cannot be heard, and an appeal nobody can hear leaves the report unadopted.

A group of members notified the Dispute Settlement Body on 30 April 2020 of a Multi-Party Interim Appeal Arbitration Arrangement, which uses the arbitration provision at Article 25 of the same Understanding to hear appeals between the members that have signed up to it. It binds nobody else, and the members outside it are the reason the arrangement is described as interim.

What is negotiated, and what is declared

No two members joined on the same terms. An applicant under Article XII negotiates with a working party open to any member that asks for a seat on it, and what comes out is a working party report and schedules of concessions on goods and services written for that applicant alone. Timor-Leste's membership took effect on 30 August 2024, after a working party that had been sitting since 2016. A government granted observer status has five years to begin accession negotiations, the Holy See excepted.

One category is not negotiated at all. A member decides for itself whether it counts as a developing country for the purposes of the agreements, and that self-designation carries longer implementation periods and lighter commitments in several of them. Other members can and do contest a claim in the committees without any agreed definition to appeal to. The least-developed group is the exception, taken from the list the United Nations maintains, and Article XI asks commitments of those members only so far as their development, financial and trade needs and their administrative capacities allow.