TWN Info Service on WTO and Trade Issues (Oct26/08)
8 October 2026
Third World Network

WTO: DG questioned on ECA role as LDCs protest over meeting calendar
Published in SUNS #10529 dated 8 October 2026 

Geneva, 7 Oct (D. Ravi Kanth) -- The Director-General of the World Trade Organization, Ms Ngozi Okonjo- Iweala, faced pointed questioning from a broad cross-section of the membership at the General Council (GC) meeting on 5-6 October, both over her decision to act as depository for the plurilateral Agreement on Electronic Commerce (ECA) and over a meeting calendar that the least developed countries (LDCs) say is shutting their delegations out of the organisation's work.

In both debates, the DG's reply to members followed a similar line, according to ambassadors present at the meeting.

Defending her acceptance of the depository role for the ECA, she told members that if she needed "to seek permission from members at every step" in carrying out her duties, "that would be a violation of the functional independence of the Secretariat under Article VI of the WTO Agreement."

Some hours later, responding to the LDC group's complaint about a clash of meetings, she said the Secretariat could not cancel meetings because "we don't have the authority."

She told members, "You cannot make the Secretariat the butt of whatever is not working for you."

The two exchanges have sharpened questions that a number of developing countries have been raising for some time about how far the Director-General and the Secretariat can act without a mandate from the membership, and about whom the Secretariat answers to when members disagree.

LDCs to withhold support?

On 6 October, under the GC agenda item of "other business", The Gambia, speaking on behalf of the LDC group, highlighted what it described as the severe challenges that small delegations have faced with overlapping meetings since the summer break.

It said consultations had been called "intermittently in advance of the main meetings", with "little to no notice", leaving no time to brief capitals or consult with other members.

"Our ambassadors and experts are mandated to attend all of these meetings," the LDC group said. "However, our capitals are now becoming critically aware of the fact that little, if anything, has been done by the Secretariat to avoid these clashes."

The LDC group said its members had relied on other delegations "to run to committees and councils to make interventions for us" and had prepared statements overnight.

"While we are LDCs, we are members with the same rights under the rules," it said, adding that the LDC group was "not the demandeur in declaring [that] the WTO [is] facing irrelevance and requiring an overhaul."

The LDC statement closed with a warning. If the LDCs were not given space in the schedule, then it said, "we may have to withhold our support for positions until we can attend, consult, and participate effectively."

The GC chair then invited the Director-General to respond.

In a defensive reply, Ms Okonjo-Iweala first acknowledged that the clash of meetings was real. "I know many of them have only one or two in their mission, so their challenges are real," she said.

She then turned the issue back to the members. "I mean, we can't cancel meetings if facilitators and committee chairs and so on decide to have meetings. We don't have the authority. We are being challenged even on making simple decisions," she said.

"You cannot make the Secretariat the butt of whatever is not working for you. We will do our best, but I have to defend my staff."

"This is not Secretariat-bashing day," the DG said, according to several ambassadors present during the final minutes of the two-day meeting.

"I've never been in an organization where members are frustrated, they just turn on the administration. I've never been. This is [my] first experience and I have 40 years working."

The LDC group's request had been a narrow one. It had told the General Council that if the Secretariat sifted through the group's interventions in the recent WTO reform meetings, it would find suggestions already on the table, and it had asked the Secretariat "to do more than circulate new calendars."

Several LDC delegates described the Director-General's response as dismissive of the concerns their group had raised repeatedly over recent weeks, and said it was unfair to cast a request for better coordination as an attack on the Secretariat.

A senior Secretariat official then outlined the online calendar and room-booking tools introduced in recent years, and told members that "resources are not increasing, but they are in fact decreasing."

Shortly afterwards, the DG returned to the floor with what she called updates "on a lighter note", reporting record attendance at the WTO's recent Public Forum and brisk sales at the new Members' Marketplace, where she said products from the Philippines and Peru had sold out.

The tone of the exchange stood in stark contrast to the response of the General Council chair, Ambassador Clare Kelly of New Zealand, to similar concerns expressed a day earlier.

Closing the agenda item on WTO reform on 5 October, the chair said, "I've heard clearly your concerns voiced about the pace and scheduling of the reform effort. I find these reasonable and persuasive," and undertook to look "across the entire schedule of our work in the House."

Several delegations, including Tanzania, Cambodia, Burkina Faso and India, had raised the scheduling problem in that debate.

Tanzania told the GC that "The scheduling of WTO reform meetings in parallel with sessions of other WTO bodies poses a considerable difficulty for our small delegations."

Invited to speak at the end of the agenda item on WTO reform on 5 October, the DG declined.

According to one Latin American representative, however, "the Director-General kept taking the floor in the transparency plenary on reform on 30 September when she has no legal standing to be speaking in that body and the General Council Chair kept giving her the floor."

On 6 October, the DG took the floor five times at the chair's invitation, on Aid for Trade, on both ECA items, in response to the LDC group and to give updates.

In three of those interventions, on the ECA and on the calendar of meetings, she told members that their concerns were misdirected at the Secretariat.

An African ambassador, who preferred not to be named, said the tone and tenor of the DG's remarks were unfortunate, at a time when she needs the support of the members in what the ambassador described as a lacklustre organisation.

A question for reform

On the ECA, what stands out is the widening interpretation that the DG and the Secretariat are now giving to their own mandate.

In her reply to members, the DG said that many of her duties and responsibilities are "inherent in my position as head of the organization" and that the WTO Agreement "does not prejudge the scope of the depository function" she can exercise.

Her written response, circulated as document JOB/GC/522, argued that had the parties to the WTO Agreement wanted to limit the Director-General from acting as depository for other treaties, they could have said so explicitly.

To support that reading, the DG drew on customary international law and the practice of the UN Secretary- General, and told members that holding back because of concerns voiced by individual members would itself breach Article VI of the WTO Agreement.

The reading applied in the two debates runs in opposite directions. When members asked the DG to account for the depository decision, her office was said to carry inherent powers requiring no mandate.

When the LDCs asked the Secretariat to manage a calendar that it administers, it had no authority to act.

The Secretariat's readiness to service an agreement that members have twice declined to bring into the WTO legal framework also sits uneasily with its own admission, on the same day, that its resources are shrinking.

A legal expert at a think tank in Geneva, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the two debates pointed to a shift in the character of the organisation.

"The WTO was built as a member-driven organisation, and whatever authority the Secretariat has flows from the members. What we saw this week is a Secretariat that reads silence in the Marrakesh Agreement as permission, treats questions from members as interference with its independence, and when pressed to account for its decisions, tells members to sort it out among themselves," the expert said.

"Article VI protects the Secretariat from pressure by individual governments. It was never intended to shield the Secretariat from the collective oversight of the members it serves. When the head of the Secretariat decides what falls within her own powers, and members who question that are told they are missing the point, the line between serving the membership and governing it begins to blur," the expert added.

The functions and powers of the Secretariat are already among the issues raised in the WTO reform process, and the events of this week are likely to keep them there.

Speaking in the debate on the ECA, India recalled the words of Singapore's founding Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew, that "the purpose is not just to be righteous. The purpose is to have a system which will carry on because it has not been compromised." +