World Trade Organization

The World Trade Organization (WTO) is an international organization regulating multilateral trade in goods, services and intellectual property rights on the basis of the package of Uruguay Round agreements. Its activities are based on the principles of most-favoured-nation treatment, national treatment, reciprocity of concessions and transparency of trade policy. Decisions are taken by consensus; voting by qualified majority is provided for de jure but is not applied in practice.

The supreme body is the Ministerial Conference, convened, as a rule, once every two years. Between conferences, the ongoing work is carried out by the General Council (composed of ambassadors and heads of delegations), which also acts as the Dispute Settlement Body and the Trade Policy Review Body. Administrative support is provided by the Secretariat headed by the Director-General.

Belarus has been negotiating its accession to the WTO for more than 30 years: the Working Party was established on 27 October 1993 (initially within the framework of the GATT), and Belarus holds observer status. In 2016, the transition to the draft Working Party Report was secured and the negotiations reached their final stage. The negotiations were conducted in three areas: bringing legislation into conformity with WTO rules, market access for goods and services, and state support for agriculture.

In 2022, amid the high politicization of the work of international organizations, the process of Belarus’s accession was “frozen”.