SOURCE: Antigua Sun

The U.S. is unlikely to back down from its position on online gambling, despite facing billions of dollars in claims. Instead, it is maintaining that withdrawal from World Trade Organization (WTO) trade obligations to grant market access to Internet gambling companies is the best way to resolve the ongoing dispute with Antigua and Barbuda.

In an interview with the Antigua Sun yesterday, a trade official in the office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR), who asked not to be named in this article, said the U.S. sees its current course as the best way of achieving closure on the issue.

“We are trying to clarify, by using Article 21 of the GATS agreement (General Agreement on Trade in Services) that our obligations should not extend to gambling,” he said.

An offshoot of this Article 21 process is that the U.S. must reach settlements with all WTO member states which filed compensation claims.

In May, after the WTO formally adopted the ruling of its Dispute Settlement Body declaring the U.S. in continued violation of its commitments under the GATS, in relation to the restrictions the U.S. has placed on remote gambling, Antigua and Barbuda called on the 150 members of the WTO to join it in filing compensation claims against the United States.

The European Union, Australia, Canada, Costa Rica, India, Macao and Japan answered that call.

“We are actively working to negotiate, under Article 21, with all of the WTO members which made claims, and there are eight of them, including Antigua. We believe we can reach an expeditious solution using this procedure.”

“We’ve been quite pleased, to date, that the members who have made claims seem to be approaching this issue with a sense of seriousness and realism and that they generally seem determined to reach a solution; and we continue to believe that this Article 21 process is really the path that is most likely to lead to a resolution of this issue,” the trade official told the SUN.

This assessment conflicts with those of Antigua and Barbuda’s WTO attorney Mark Mendel who, in an interview with the SUN shortly after meeting with U.S. Article 21 negotiators at the beginning of August, dismissed the meeting as unproductive and accused the U.S. team of calling the meeting simply so they could say they had met with Antigua and Barbuda. The USTR representative was also present at that meeting and told the SUN that on the other hand that the session was useful.

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