6:57 AM Nov 16, 1995

SINGLE OVERVIEW ON REGIONAL AGREEMENTS ?

Geneva 15 Nov (Chakravarthi Raghavan) -- The World Trade Organization (WTO) appears to be moving in the direction of better monitoring and supervision of regional trading arrangements and ensuring their conformity with the WTO/GATT rules. A meeting of the WTO General Council Wednesday agreed to hold consultations on this issue over a Canadian proposal for a single committee on regional trading arrangements which would also look into the new agreements or arrangements notified.

Canada has proposed such a committee for "better organizing work in this area, as well as provide a forum for examination of the relationship of regional trading arrangements to the multilateral trading system", and consultations on this by the chairman of the General Council, but avoiding "disrupting work already in train".

The Canadian Amb. John Weekes noted that there were now 20 separate working parties looking at various regional trade arrangements and agreements notified to the WTO. Together with the biennial review of existing arrangements and their conformity with the WTO, there would be one hundred meetings a year solely on this question (stretching and taxing human resources of delegations).

Some 28 delegations spoke supporting the Canadian proposal.

In other actions, the General Council accepted the recommendations of its working party on the accession to the WTO of Tonga. Thirty days after Tonga accepts the protocol and signs it, it will become a member.

At an earlier meeting, the Council has approved schedules of Qatar, St. Kitts and Nevis, and Papua New Guinea - a requisite for old GATT cps becoming WTO members.

The WTO membership, a spokesman said, now stood at 110 and will become 111 Friday, with Madagascar (having completed the formalities) becoming a member. Seventeen of the old GATT contracting parties are to complete the formalities to become a WTO member.

The old GATT 1947, now co-existing with WTO and its GATT 1994 is due to be wound up in December.

In other actions, the General Council also took note of arrangements for WTO's cooperation with the UN.

Stopping short of specialized agency agreements mandated by the UN Charter to govern relationships between the UN and all intergovernmental institutions in economic and social sectors, the accord continues the earlier arrangements between the UN and GATT, a provisional arrangement without an institutional basis and got a legal umbrella for this, including a secretariat, as the secretariat of the Interim Committee for the International Trade Organization established by the UN's ECOSOC in 1948 (when it set up the ICITO and its secretariat) and the subsequent decision of the Assembly in 1976 along the same lines.

The General Council this year asked the WTO Director-General to work out with the UN a 'global arrangement' for continuing the same relationship as in the past between the UN and the GATT. The consultations between the WTO head and the UN Chief, reflected in an exchange of letters, has confirmed these arrangements, including with UNCTAD and the joint running by UNCTAD and WTO of the International Trade Centre (ITC).

However, several UN experts including former UN official Erskine Childers (who spoke to a recent meeting here of the NGOs) view continuance of such ad hoc arrangements as contrary to the UN Charter.

In agreeing to continuing arrangements and practices set out in a UN General Assembly document of 1976, UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros Ghali said that within this framework, specific arrangements for UNCTAD/WTO cooperation would be pursued by the two secretariats.

The arrangements among others would enable the WTO staff to use the UN laissez passer for travel. Some WTO staff members who on 1 January, when WTO came into being asserted their independence from the UN system, suddenly discovered the UN had its uses in terms of the laissez passer, without which they have to use their own national passports and get visas for travel. The staff are still striving to get same staff conditions and emoluments as the Bretton Woods institutions, but have found the WTO membership not agreeable.