International colloquium on Restoring Trust in Trade in honour of Peter Van den Bossche
On 17 December the Law Faculty of Maastricht University hosted an international colloquium entitled “Restoring Trust in Trade” in honour of Professor Peter Van den Bossche.
This well-attended colloquium brought together friends of Peter Van den Bossche, including his mentor, colleagues and students to pay tribute to his invaluable contribution to the evolution and understanding of WTO law as a rules-based system eliciting trust.
The colloquium focused on a key challenge facing the international trading system, namely the rapidly eroding trust in trade liberalisation and economic integration, as embodied in the rules of the World Trade Organization and the European Union. The ability of these regimes not only to strike a fair and sustainable balance between trade liberalisation and other societal values and interests, but also to deliver welfare to the benefit of all is increasingly called into question. This waning trust is manifested in defining politico-economic developments of our time, most notably Brexit and the current US administration's unilateral trade policies.
The colloquium uniquely presented the insights of renowned experts from the WTO Secretariat, the WTO Appellate Body, the European Commission, and academia, as well as challenging ‘young voices’, in presenting a critical look at what has gone wrong with the international trade regime and how it can be addressed.
| Watch the slides and video recordings of the presentations. The contributions are compiled in a Liber Amicorum published by Hart. The organizers, IGIR fellows Denise Prevost, Iveta Alexovicova and Jens Hillebrand Pohl, warmly thank the Faculty, the SWOL fund and IGIR for their support of this successful event. |
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