Brussels, 27/01/2004 (Agence Europe) - On Monday the World Trade Organisation (WTO) decided to launch arbitration procedures requested by the USA to determine the extent of the reprisals by the Union and seven other countries to sanction the damages of several million USD suffered as a result of the Byrd Amendment. The decision on authorising sanctions or not was postponed till the publication of the expert's verdict, who will be appointed in the next few days by the Director General Supachaï Panichpakdi or chosen among the 3 members of the initial panel. This waiting period may be extended to around sixty days and leaves little room for manoeuvre by the US administration to obtain from a more reticent Congress, action that would enable reprisals to be prevented and which no one really wants.
In this decidedly complex affair where even simple formalities, such as holding a special session in Geneva becomes rocky ground, the organisation for settling disputes took the arguments of both sides into account before suspending the examination of sanction authorisation demands and ratifying that presented on Friday by the USA which contains many objections. Washington also says that the different sides have not specified the level of their possible sanctions and that certain of them (eight except for Chile) have demanded authorisation for suspending concessions for damages causes to other members. Ironically, the US Representative added that he was delighted to deduce in these demands for authorisation, as much implicit recognition of the sanctions merry-go-round (an American invention of which European business was the first target). Steven Fabry said that they were happy to see that members were endorsing the merry-go-round and that they hoped that this got rid of the contentious issue of their discussions on clarification and improvement of dispute settlement procedures, which were part of the Doha development procedure. Representatives from the EU, Canada, Japan, India, south Korea, Brazil, Mexico and Chile stressed the purely formal aspect of their approach and hoped that they would soon see this US legislation disappear, whose illegality had been established a year ago and which continued to use double protection against foreign competition to the benefit of US producers involved in anti-dumping and anti-subsidy procedures. Up to now the amount of these fines pad to them over three years is around USD 800 million, according to Brazil, India and Mexico. A windfall which US steel producers are the main beneficiaries.