WTO Law And Sustainable Development

With resources and environmental problems being increasingly serious, humans began to reflect on their own development model, from the middle of twentieth century. International community called for strengthening the protection of environment and resources, and hope to find a kind of development model which can coordinate the economic development and ecological protection. The sustainable development emerged in this historical background, and gradually became the trend of the times.As the world’s largest international trade organization, WTO bears the mission of development of international trade. In order to comply with the trend of the development of times, and promote the sustainable development of international trade, WTO adopted the sustainable development into its preface, and made it the goal of development, opening up a new era for the sustainable development of international trade. However, due to the sustainable development is not inherent theory in the WTO legal system, although the WTO law has made a positive response to it, the sustainable development within the WTO legal system still confronts with theory and system obstacles, which needed to be overcome.This article is divided into five chapters to research WTO law and sustainable development. The first chapter combs the theory of the sustainable development, exploring its historical evolution and development in WTO law. Moreover, the first chapter discusses what is sustainable development and what’s the meaning of researching sustainable development in the WTO law. The second chapter makes a further detailed investigation of the sustainable development, expounding the position of the sustainable development now in WTO law, and how the WTO law fulfill the two important goal of the sustainable development(fair, environmental and resources protection). The third chapter mainly discussed the current WTO legal system obstacles faced by sustainable development, from the point of view of legal theory, including the limitations of the theory and institutional barriers such as green trade barriers and multilateral environmental agreements conflicts. On this basis, the fourth chapter puts forward the prospect of sustainable development of WTO law, setting about from the theoretical framework and system level to improve it. The fifth chapter discusses how China could realize the sustainable development of foreign trade within the WTO legal framework, mainly examining the legislative status of China’s sustainable development, and putting forward the prospect that how China could realize the sustainable development of foreign trade after its accession to WTO.