Strengthening the Compliance of the OIC Member States
to International Standards
16
The WTO Agreements only apply to “measures” under the SPS Agreement and “technical regulations”
under the TBT Agreement. Both fields of direct application are therefore limited to mandatory standards.
In essence, they require that importing country standards should be non-discriminatory in design and
application, and should restrict trade as little as possible. In the case of the SPS Agreement, there is the
added requirement that measures should have a scientific basis. Both Agreements fully safeguard the
rights of WTO members to pursue legitimate regulatory objectives, such as consumer protection,
quarantine and prevention of pest infestation, food safety, and health. In simple terms, the Agreements
provide a framework within which members can pursue those objectives in a way that is as compatible
as possible with the aims of the multilateral trading system, has minimum negative consequences for
trading partners, and as a result entails minimum economic costs for a given level of protection.
Importantly for OIC member states, both Agreements privilege the use of international standards. In
both cases, the Agreements require members to use international standards unless good reasons exist
for departing from them—reasons that can ultimately be adjudicated upon by the WTO Dispute
Settlement Body in the case where a trading partner raises an objection. As a starting point, therefore,
countries in the process of building or strengthening their quality infrastructure are well advised to give
a significant if not preponderant role to international standards in the interests of ensuring that their
measures are in conformity with WTO rules.
The area of voluntary standards—although of high and increasing importance commercially—is not
directly governed by the WTO Agreements. However, there are Codes of Conduct for private standards
bodies issuing voluntary standards, which incorporate the core WTO disciplines. Application of the
Codes is voluntary, and practice differs across WTO member states. In the context of the Doha Round,
there have been discussions about bringing private, voluntary standards within the ambit of the WTO,
but there is as yet no resolution on this question, and one seems unlikely in the short term. For the
moment, then, private standards remain largely outside the WTO system—although there is substantial
evidence that they have a significant effect on trade (e.g., Czubala et al., 2009; and Shepherd and Wilson,
2013).