Tribute to Gabrielle Marceau from a New Zealand Colleague

Chère Gabrielle, You have been a vivacious, positive, grounded and stalwart colleague over many years. I’m delighted that David and Geneviève should be publishing this tribute publication in your honour and especially happy to write this short piece for inclusion. As many readers will know, Gabrielle has contributed centrally to the vital and development of a sustained link between academia and the bureaucracy of the World Trade Organization (WTO), invigorating discussion and dialogue on the issues of the day and on overarching institutional and ideological changes in international trade regulation. This is no less than a contribution that has helped to change history. Through the energy invested by Gabrielle and colleagues, the WTO has become a more open organisation, and this has immeasurably enhanced academic work and in turn helped feed into the evolution of the WTO itself. Gabrielle and others have achieved all this while respecting the limitations of their roles as international civil servants, which is much to be admired. As with Gabrielle, my own career has spanned government and academic work. In the mid 1990s, this provided the opportunity to appreciate at first hand the extraordinary event that took place with the founding of the WTO. Over this decade I was with the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade. The change was profound, particularly in terms of the legal work required to deal with what was now a fully-fledged international dispute settlement system. Meantime the WTO Secretariat had expanded and the institutional lawyers’ work had taken off. Visiting the WTO in the early 2000s, I met Gabrielle for the first time, as well as valued colleagues including Gretchen Stanton, Joost Pauwelyn, Thomas Cottier and Peter Van den Bossche. Their breadth of insights into international trade and its social, developmental and environmental dimensions was apparent. Though the technical aspects of their roles at the WTO demanded a coalface engagement, they were also outward-facing, and willing to share broader insights into the issues on which they worked in real world terms. Gabrielle was among those who so kindly engaged with my primary research interest at the time, which was in the rules of evidence in scientific disputes and international courts and tribunals, including on expert evidence, burden of proof and finality of decision-making with reference to the precautionary principle, later published with Cambridge University Press. She and I were both interested subsequently to see judges at the International Court of Justice draw directly on the WTO’s experience with scientific cases when considering the potential advancement of the Court’s own practice in the case concerning Pulp Mills on the River Uruguay (Argentina v Uruguay) in 2010. Considerable discussion has continued to follow on this topic, both in academia and in practice, and across broader fields of international dispute settlement, including under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. Gabrielle became a steadfast ally when preparing journal articles for publication, always well familiar with the evolving jurisprudence and practice, and ready to contribute her academic perspectives, including on trade and environmental matters more broadly. Meantime in addition to her variety of roles in the WTO Secretariat, including as Counsellor in the Cabinet of DG Pascal Lamy from 2005 to 2010, Gabrielle supervised over the years numerous University of Geneva doctoral students. In 2012 she took on the presidency of the newly established Society of International Economic Law (SIEL), and I well recall the Society’s prior inaugural conference in 2008 in Geneva at the Centre on Trade and Economic Integration and Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies. In this capacity Gabrielle made a further major …