Gatt art. III, paragraph 8, excluding the GATT national treatment obligation and the GATS, Article XIII, paragraph 2, which excludes the application of most GATS obligations. The question of whether an MFN obligation applies to the GATT award is discussed: see Reich, “The New GATT Agreement on Government Procurement The Pitfalls of Plurilateralism and Strict Reciprocity” (1997) 31 J. World Trade 125.Google Scholar The transparency obligations of Article III of the GATS, however, apply to public procurement, including the requirement to publish general measures to purchase services It is less obvious than the requirement to publish general trade measures under art. GATT X is suitable for public procurement. The competent authority of the United Kingdom considers that the United Kingdom, if it signs a bilateral or multilateral agreement authorizing the international transport of certain dangerous goods on and off its territory without full respect for the ADR, would authorize the domestic transport of this property with the same exemptions, but only by the air carriers of the United Kingdom and other countries that are signatories to this agreement. Bilateral/multilateral agreements essentially modify ADRs for the contracting parties that sign them, but the other parties remain subject to the full requirements of the ADR in those areas. In Montreal, on May 25, 1998, the Montreal Conference on Global economies was blocked for five hours by hundreds of Activists of Operation SalAMI,[28] on the basis of the French acronym for the proposed agreement, AMI, not only for sausage, but also for a “dirty friend”. Operation Salami called on Canada to withdraw from the MAI negotiations. The presence at the conference of one of the main players in the MAI, Donald Johnston (OECD Secretary-General), helped to focus on action, one of the three main anti-AMI events in the world. These mobilizations at the international level did indeed lead to the revision of the agreement.

The award-winning documentary Pressure Point: Inside the Montreal Blockade recorded the drama of this action that resulted in the arrest of 100 people. [29] The text of the agreement establishes rules that require open, fair and transparent conditions of competition for public procurement. However, these rules do not automatically apply to all purchasing activities of each party. On the contrary, hedging schedules play a key role in determining whether or not a buying activity is covered by the agreement.