How to sign up to receive automatic emails from THE WTO TBT notifications on the export alert! Talk to the National Institutes of Standards and Technology. the same product, compatibility and interchangeability. If you have any questions about this agreement or its use, you can send an email to the Office of Trade Agreements Negotiations and Compliance, which will forward your message to the Department of Commerce supervisor designated for the agreement. You can also contact the designated monitoring manager at: The author thanks Patrick Macrory, Peter Van den Bosche, Marielle Matthee and Veijo Heiskanen for their comments and suggestions on different designs. All remaining errors are those of the author. Parts of this chapter come from a training manual developed by the author for the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), Race on Dispute Settlement, World Trade Organization, 3.10 Technical Barriers to Trade (2003). The Community`s sardine debate is partly contained in a joint document with Veijo Heiskanen, presented in the autumn of 2002 at the annual meeting of the World Trade Law Association in London. It will appear in the World Consumer Association`s Yearbook. Yes, yes. If your company is affected by the fact that another WTO member country is not complying with the WTO agreement on technical barriers to trade, you are going to negotiate and comply with trade agreements within the U.S. Department of Commerce.

The Centre can help you understand your rights under this agreement and warn U.S. government officials to ask questions of the other country, if any, to help you resolve your problem. The full text of the WTO Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade is available in the Office for Trade Agreements and Compliance database. The TBT agreement provides that the governments of WTO member states ensure that products imported from another WTO country are treated at the national level and that the nation`s most favoured treatment (MFN) is granted. (national treatment refers to treatment that is no less favourable than treatment of similar products of national origin; MFN refers to a treatment that is no less favourable than treatment of similar products from another country.) In order to ensure that compliance assessment procedures do not create unnecessary barriers to international trade, the TBT convention also provides that compliance assessment is the method used to determine whether a product meets the requirements of a technical regulation or standard. Under the OBT agreement, compliance assessment is provided: in accordance with the agreement, the governments of WTO member states determine, as far as possible, technical rules and standards with regard to performance and not interpretation or descriptive characteristics. Protecting the health and safety of citizens and workers With respect to standards for which compliance is voluntary, the OBT agreement contains a ”code of good practice for the preparation, adoption and application of standards,” which is a voluntary code that can be adopted by any standard-setting organization in a WTO member country.