... is coming tomorrow. Reuters has the most detail I've seen so far. The EU is appealing all of the obvious issues: export contingency, causation of serious prejudice, and many of the existence of a subsidy / specificity findings. Two other interesting issues to watch are the following:
- The EU will appeal against some other "cross-cutting" findings, for example the impact of changes in ownership and the extraction of cash by shareholders on subsidies.
- It will also argue that subsidies made before 1995 cannot be part of a WTO dispute since the WTO agreement on subsidies only came into effect then.
I hope to have something to say on the first one at some point in the near future.
We may learn a bit more when the notice of appeal becomes public, but we probably won't get the key details until the EU posts its appellant's submission online (hopefully that will happen fairly quickly after it is filed, although I can imagine that if it has a lot of confidential info in it, it might take a little while).
ADDED: The EU has posted the notice of appeal here: http://trade.ec.europa.eu/doclib/docs/2010/july/tradoc_146379.pdf
In its press release about the notice of appeal, the EU notes: "While the timeline for the appeal process (through the WTO Appellate Body) is shorter than that of panels, i.e. normally 90 days, it is not unusual that proceedings for more complex disputes such as this one require more time." So when can we expect to see the AB report? Will, this is just speculation, but I might go with 140 days. This is the highest figure for amount of time taken by the Appellate Body, but it's also the most frequently used extension time, and also the most recently used extension time (in the Hormones Suspension cases). And given the number of issues appealed by the EU, and their complexity, and the coming U.S. cross-appeal, going for the longest time period seems like a good bet. Just to save you the trouble, 140 days from today takes us to Wednesday, December 8, 2010. (But just to emphasize again, that's pure speculation -- the AB will tell us the date in due course!)
