SUNS  4307 Thursday 22 October 1998


MASSACHUSETTS BURMA SANCTIONS LAW FOR WTO PANEL

Geneva, 21 Oct (Chakravarthi Raghavan) -- The World Trade Organization's dispute settlement body referred disputes raised by the EC and Japan against the trade and investment sanctions imposed by the state of Massachusetts in the US on corporations and firms doing business with Burma.

All such firms are denied government procurement contracts in Massachusetts and the EC and Japan raised it as a violation of the plurilateral agreement on government procurement.

In other matters before the DSB, requests for panels in three separate disputes, which came up for the first time, panel references were blocked by the parties concerned:

* dispute raised by Canada against ban on use of asbestos by France on health grounds,

* dispute by US against Mexico on anti-dumping investigations of imports of American fructose sugar, and

* dispute by Hungary against Slovakia over imports of wheat.

While reference to panels on these three were blocked this time, they can be brought up and automatically sent to a panel at the next meeting, set for Nov 20. However the DSB will be holding a
special meeting on 6th of November for the automatic adoption of two rulings by the WTO appellate body, one on the shrimp-turtle dispute (between a number of Asian countries and the US) and on
salmon between Canada and Australia.

Earlier, Ecuador and other complainants (including the US) again found fault with the EC proposals on how it would give effect to the ruling on bananas, and said that very little time would be left
(within the implementation period) for the complainants to reconvene the panel (under Art. 21.5 of the DSU) to rule on the compatibility of the proposed EC measures with the ruling.

The US congressional moves to authorize unilateral sanctions against the EC, in case it did not implement the ruling also figured in the discussions.

Among the speakers, Cuba again flagged the issue of the problems that the banana ruling would pose for the small island economies of the Caribbean, while Jamaica said that the EC measure to implement the ruling had to be in compliance with the WTO and also the Lome agreement.