The EU and its Member States in WTO dispute settlement: A ‘competence model’, or a case apart, for managing international responsibility?

The aim of this chapter is to examine and assess the participation of the European Union (EU) and its Member States (MS) in the dispute settlement system of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), with a focus on one legally and politically important question: how their unique position as full WTO members has affected their respective responsibility for the performance of WTO obligations. As is the case for any other ‘mixed’ agreement, this joint EU/MS membership of the WTO inevitably prompts the question of ‘who is responsible’ towards third parties for breaches of WTO law. The question of the EU’s international responsibility vis-à- vis that of its Member States has been the subject of intense study in the past years, partly due to the increasingly prominent role of the Union on the international scene but also the work of the International Law Commission (ILC) on the Articles on the Responsibility of International Organisations (ARIO). And yet within this broader debate, the WTO is often presented in the academic literature as providing both an ‘exceptional’ and ‘exemplary’ case-study.