Old & New Dispute Secretariats

What are secretariats for in international dispute settlement bodies? The question is implicit in much of what Joost Pauwelyn and Krzysztof Pelc have written in their important article, “Who Guards the ‘Guardians of the System?’ The Role of the Secretariat in WTO Dispute Settlement,” but is one that they do not ask outright.1 Pauwelyn and Pelc thoughtfully describe what the World Trade Organization (WTO) dispute settlement secretariat (WTO Secretariat) does as part of their call to determine what the WTO Secretariat is for. Asking what secretariats ought to be for advances the valuable work that has been done on these institutions with an eye to new secretariats that states are now constructing. This Essay makes two points. First, it argues that the work of the WTO Secretariat is typical of many international adjudicatory secretariats, especially those assisting with disputes over matters of international economic law. Seeing those similarities helps us understand how dispute settlement constituencies view the purpose of such secretariats: to carry out the activities highlighted by Pauwelyn and Pelc. Second, the essay picks up where Pauwelyn and Pelc left off and maintains that our collective attention ought to turn to newly envisioned and recently constructed trade dispute secretariats, and their substitutes. The authors provide a platform for examining what experimental designs of secretariats in upcoming trade agreements might look like, and, more important, what we think those secretariats are for.