The continued vacancy of the WTO Appellate Body is reshaping member behaviour in measurable ways. With appointments still blocked, panel reports in several disputes have been appealed into a procedural vacuum, leaving them without final adjudication. The accumulation of these suspended outcomes has revived interest in the Multi-Party Interim Appeal Arbitration arrangement, which replicates appellate review through Article 25 arbitration among participating members.
Recent accessions have broadened the arrangement’s coverage, and trade ministries that previously stayed outside it are reassessing. The calculus is straightforward: a binding appellate stage, even an improvised one, preserves the predictability that exporters and investors price in. The counterargument, advanced by holdouts, is that institutionalising a workaround reduces pressure to resolve the underlying appointments dispute.
For now the system operates on two tracks. Disputes between MPIA participants proceed to a genuine appellate determination; disputes involving non-participants risk terminating at the panel stage with no enforceable result. Practitioners increasingly factor a counterpart’s MPIA status into forum and settlement strategy, treating it as a material variable rather than a procedural footnote.