Official: Russia disagrees with US over violations of WTO norms

MOSCOW, Dec 29 (PRIME) -- Russia disagrees with conclusions of the U.S. Trade Representative Office regarding Moscow’s alleged violations of obligations under the World Trade Organization (WTO) regulations, Maxim Medvedkov, director of the trade negotiations department of the Economic Development Ministry, told PRIME late on Wednesday.

The office said that Russia’s general actions in trade policy do not correspond with the WTO norms and the U.S. will continue tracking them and may use all possible mechanisms, including filing complaints to the WTO dispute settlement body.

Medvedkov said that the report contained no new elements that Moscow had not known before, and similar claims were made in a report for 2015 and in a September 2016 review of Russia’s trade policy at meetings of different bodies of the WTO. The critics are based only on the suspicions, and Russia sees the situation differently.

“There are no and can’t be any large-scale violations of the WTO regulations because we are very serious toward fulfilling our international liabilities, and we even have no necessity in it as our legislation has long been brought in line with regulations of WTO agreements,” he said.

“Besides, we are learning from other participants of the organization, including the U.S., the art of writing the necessary economy regulation measures into norms of international legislation, and almost each new law initiative passes expertise of compliance to the WTO norms.”

The imports substitution program is mainly implemented in spheres that are not covered by international liabilities, and its goal is to increase competitiveness of domestic products. “Still, we will carefully study the report and make conclusions, correlations to positions of other WTO members, and compare our measures and liabilities once again,” he said.

But the WTO system is based on participants controlling each other to prevent violations, and Russia is also preparing a report on the U.S. actions. “Our list of claims against the U.S. is long. It includes violations of WTO rules in anti-dumping investigations, subsidies to some industries, and a rejection to provide a full-scale WTO regime to China,” Medvedkov said.

When joining the WTO, China agreed on a transition period when special protective measures may be applied against Chinese goods.

“The period has expired, but some WTO members, and the U.S. among them, refuse to stop discrimination of Chinese goods, or they work out sophisticated schemes that will allow them to keep or even increase the discrimination, as these schemes may be in future applied to imports from all countries, including Russia, and compliance of the schemes to the WTO rules is doubtful,” he said.

End