Environment-led technical regulations

Technical regulations designed to protect the environment might restrict international trade, and must therefore observe with the TBT to be WTO-lawful. The TBT ensures that technical regulations are not protectionist, ineffective, inefficient and irrational. Without interfering with WTO members’ environmental priorities and preferences, the TBT rewards convergence towards international standards and makes unilateralism inconvenient. Environmental regulations under the TBT expose some of its normative ambiguities and the slipperiness of some key notions. The discipline of environmental regulation challenges the difference between standards and regulations, the relevance of non-product related process and production methods, and questions what it means at all for a regulation to be “technical.”