Human Rights and the WTO: Are They Really Oil and Water?

It is remarkable how many critiques of the approach of the World Trade Organization (WTO) to human rights include the phrase: 'WTO should ...'. In many cases WTO actually 'shouldn't' because even if it 'would' it 'couldn't'. With the exception of the Dispute Settlement Procedures (DSP) the WTO does not really have an independent institutional decision-making power. It is nevertheless true that this international forum of free trade has remained remarkably conservative regarding human rights even after the end of 'the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) years' and the establishing of the WTO. Many scholars accuse the WTO of organizational isolationism and advocate for overcoming this practice. Criticism focuses especially on the apparent non-responsiveness of the organization to human rights issues - despite the huge impact free trade has on such matters - and unwillingness to discuss human rights, or cooperate with international agencies that protect them. In present days, the International Bill of Rights is commonly recognized as a human rights standard. Human rights are mainstreamed in the EU body of law, as well as soft law documents such as the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) and the UN Agenda for Development. Recently, they are incorporated in the organizational statues and programme methodologies of institutions such as the World Bank (WB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The WTO seems to stay away from this process. We aim to explore the reasons for this conservative attitude of the WTO towards human rights, while trying to establish historical parallels with the gradual adoption of human rights as core standards in other international entities such as the European Union. We attempt to tackle the relationship between WTO membership and the human rights situation in its Member States and the possible implications that continuing admission of non-democratic countries - e.g., Russia - might have. We also explore the understanding of some scholars that human rights are 'seeping into the WTO system' - and briefly analyze some examples that could illustrate this process.