The Shrimp Turtle Case Case Brief Summary | Law Case Explained

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The Shrimp Turtle Case | WT/DS58/AB/R (November 6, 1998)

The United States is a member of the World Trade Organization, or W T O, which means it must comply with certain international trade agreements. We’ll see how a conflict between a United States environmental law and an international trade agreement was resolved in a famous dispute known as the Shrimp-Turtle Case.

Throughout the nineteen seventies and eighties, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, found that sea turtles were getting caught and drowning in mechanical shrimp-trawling nets. To help prevent sea turtles from dying, NOAA created Turtle Excluder Devices, or TEDs, which allow turtles to escape from shrimp-trawling nets.

In nineteen eighty-nine, Congress passed Section Six Oh Nine of Public Law One Oh One One Sixty Two. The law restricted imports of shrimp from foreign countries if shrimp were harvested using trawl nets without TEDs or comparable devices. The United States gave fourteen countries in the Caribbean a three-year phase-in period to replace their existing shrimp trawl nets. By nineteen ninety-six, the United States applied the law to all countries, which only gave countries four months to implement TEDs if the countries wanted to export shrimp to the United States.

In nineteen ninety-six, India, Malaysia, Thailand, and Pakistan challenged Section Six Oh Nine and filed a joint request for consultations at the W T O’s dispute settlement body. The countries claimed that the law violated Article Eleven of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, or GATT. Under Article Eleven, W T O members may not impose discriminatory import restrictions on other member countries. Discriminatory restrictions include treating imports from other countries differently and applying restrictions automatically to countries without giving countries time to address the issue regulated by the restriction. The United States argued that its law didn’t violate GATT because the law fell within GATT’s Article Twenty G exception. Under this exception, countries may impose import restrictions against exporting countries that are related to conserving exhaustible natural resources, as long as the restrictions aren’t arbitrary or unjustifiably discriminatory. The W T O panel held that the United States violated GATT. The United States appealed to the W T O’s appellate body.

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