The upcoming hearings of a WTO dispute panel examining an EU complaint about the US' controversial anti-dumping duty calculation practices will be opened to the public, following a request made by both parties. The next hearings will take place from 29-30 January at WTO headquarters in Geneva. The subsequent set is scheduled for 8-9 April. The panel's work is set to be completed by September.

When calculating the extent to which imports are being 'dumped' - that is, exported at artificially low prices - US trade authorities ignore ('zero out') instances where goods command higher prices in the US than at home. They only take into account cases where prices in the US are lower. Critics say that this inflates 'dumping margins', allowing injured US companies to secure inappropriately high levels of anti-dumping duties on competing imports.

Past WTO dispute panels as well as the Appellate Body have repeatedly ruled against the practice, leading the EU to state this time that it had "no doubt that the United States [would] be found in breach of its WTO obligations," and it "[hoped] that the United States [would] accept the inevitable and respond positively to the request for consultations, making further actions unnecessary."

The panel in the current case was convened in July 2007, after the two sides failed to resolve their differences in consultations dating back to autumn 2006.

Brazil, China, Egypt, India, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Norway, Taiwan, and Thailand joined the dispute as third-parties. Many of them have previously launched disputes against the US' anti-dumping practices.

Public dispute hearings are a relatively recent phenomenon in the WTO, and remain rare. The first panel proceedings to be opened to the public were in 2005, in a dispute over beef hormones that pitted the US and Canada against the EU. At the time, legal experts said that such exercises in transparency would enhance the WTO's legitimacy (see BRIDGES Weekly, 7 September 2005).