A Tribute to Gabrielle Marceau: An Invaluable Contribution

Gabrielle Marceau might have retired from the World Trade Organization (WTO). But it is unlikely that she will ever truly leave the Organization, or that it will ever truly leave her. She has had enormous influence in the Organization and no doubt will continue to exercise considerable influence for many years to come. Indeed, those of us in the international economic law field most definitely hope that she does. Gabrielle contributed over 30 years of dedicated service as a member of the WTO Secretariat. She served in many different roles, including as a senior dispute settlement lawyer, as a legal adviser in the Director-General’s office, as a frequent instructor in technical assistance missions around the globe, and as a researcher in the Economic Research and Statistics Division. She is unique in this impressive achievement: no one else can claim such a broad and extensive WTO career. Gabrielle’s contribution has established her as one of the most significant Secretariat staff members of the WTO’s first 30 years. It is fitting that this book honours Gabrielle’s tremendous public service in the field of international trade law. Although Gabrielle is probably best known for her prolific career assisting WTO panels in resolving disputes between WTO members, her initial tasks on joining the WTO Secretariat in September 1994 centered on non-dispute legal work. This was rather fortuitous, as her early work in the Secretariat no doubt contributed significantly to her becoming one of today’s leading experts in General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT)/WTO institutional law. This early and highly important contribution made by Gabrielle might be less known than her dispute settlement work, but it is an important part of the legacy she leaves with us as she retires from the WTO. For this reason, I chose to focus this tribute on her early WTO career. Gabrielle’s first assignments in the Legal Affairs Division involved the type of work that would have been the envy of every treaty lawyer at the time: providing legal advice on the institutional transition from the GATT to the WTO. The establishment of the new international organization involved a variety of complicated questions, including whether the GATT 1947 and the GATT 1994—two legally distinct instruments with the former to be included in the latter—should or could co-exist, whether WTO members should formally withdraw from the GATT 1947, and what their obligations would be if they did not withdraw upon becoming WTO members. It was not known at the time whether all GATT 1947 parties would join the WTO, or that they would all join the WTO at the same time, taking into account different domestic ratification timelines. Moreover, it was expected that non-GATT 1947 parties would join the WTO. Members needed clarity about their legal obligations taking into account the different legal relationships that could arise during the transition period. Although the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (VCLT) addresses the legal relationship among parties to successive treaties covering the same subject matter but with different memberships, some WTO members were not prepared to risk differing interpretations of their obligations under the VCLT rules. Under the circumstances, the Legal Affairs Division was tasked with drafting a number of explicit “decisions” to address various transition matters. These included a legal instrument providing for a “transitional co-existence” of the GATT 1947 and the WTO Agreement for one year: it stated that “the stability of multilateral relations would […] be furthered if the GATT 1947 and the WTO Agreement were to co-exist for a limited period of time,” but stipulated that legal obligations of WTO …