Understanding EU Practice in Bilateral Free-trade Agreements: Brita and Preferential Rules of Origin in International Law

The European Court of Justice declared in the Brita case that the West Bank and Gaza Strip are outside the territorial scope of the EC-Israel Association Agreement. Preferential treatment may only be requested for products from these areas following the rules and procedures contained in the EC-PLO Interim Association Agreement. In this journal, Harpaz and Rubinson have argued that the ECJ reliance on international law in Brita was "one dimensional, incomplete and selective" and criticised the missing reference to international trade law. This article takes a different point of view Article 34 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, at the core of the Court's decision, corresponds to the foundation of the current architecture of regional trade agreements. Moreover, when taking a closer look, international trade law and the WTO system have apparently little to add to the interpretation of the rules involved in this case. Those rules were left largely to the discretion of the parties, creating two different trading systems (the regional and the multilateral WTO system) with very complex interactions.