Founded in Paris in 1920, Gide is a leading international law firm with 12 offices spread throughout the world.
Gide is physically present in six regions of the world, with 11 offices, enabling it to act on cases globally.
Interview carried out by Elvire Fabry, senior research fellow at the Jaques Delors Insitute, March 2018.
Contrasting views of Pascal Lamy, President emeritus of the Jacques Delors Institute and former Director-General of the World Trade Organisation, and Mogens Peter Carl, former Director-General for Trade and then for the Environment to the European Commission, and Senior Advisor to Gide.
The conduct of European trade policy, long seen as the responsibility of technocrats and experts, has become an issue of public debate that rallies civil society and arouses strong emotions. Both its purpose and its effectiveness are disputed, and with those the legitimacy of how this policy is devised, negotiated and ratified. Both Pascal Lamy and Mogens Peter Carl have several decades of experience in conducting trade policy at both the EU and multilateral level. They even worked together when the former was EU Trade Commissioner (2000-2004) and the latter was Director-General of the Commission’s Directorate General for Trade (2000-2005). They compare and often constrast their analyses, opinions and convictions during this interview carried out in light of what has happened since. >> Please click here to read the interview.
Article by Gide Brussels
The European Union (the Commission and the Member States) will have to listen to its own citizens, including its own industry, in order to make its “voice” heard in a credible way through a 'critical defence' of the WTO. This will require a straightforward statement that everything is not going well in the functioning of the WTO, and that reforms are needed as soon as possible. This is the price to pay in order to avoid being caught up in an unnecessary and devastating crisis, which would reinforce the loss of confidence in supra-national free-trade instruments and mechanisms.
Please click on the PDF below to read the full article.
