From the trenches This section is intended for occasional contributions from on-the-ground prac- titioners in Geneva and national capitals. Our hope is that this category will inspire other practitioners to submit notes and articles – typically in the range of 2,000 to 10,000 words – to the World Trade Review. As with all notes and articles submitted to the World Trade Review, manuscripts in this category will be reviewed by independent referees. However, the focus is intended to be practice oriented and at least one of the two referees will be a fellow practitioner. f Faizel Ismail doi:10.1017/S1474745609990073 An assessment of the WTO Doha Round July–December 2008 collapse FAIZEL ISMAIL* Head of South African Delegation to the World Trade Organization, Geneva, Switzerland 1. Introduction The WTO Doha Round negotiations were launched in November 2001, in Doha, Qatar in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attack on the US. The event was a sig- nificant success for the newly formed WTO after the dramatic failure of the Seattle Ministerial Conference held in December 1999 to launch the new round. However, this initial success was to be marred by several subsequent failed ministerial 1 meetings and missed deadlines. The Doha mandate called for * Email: faizel.ismail@ties.itu.int The author is indebted to Amrita Narlikar and Rorden Wilkinson for the challenging comments and suggestions made on earlier versions of the paper that inspired the final draft. The original research for this paper was undertaken for a forthcoming book edited by Amrita Narlikar and Brendan Vickers. 1 The WTO has formal Ministerial Conferences that are required to take place at least once in two years. Since its formation at the Marrakech Ministerial Meeting, the WTO has held five Ministerial Conferences, with the last being the 6th Ministerial Conference held in Hong Kong, in December 2005. However, there are other informal ministerial gatherings of the WTO that have taken different forms, including so-called mini-ministerial meetings that were held to discuss the launch of the Doha Round, small groups of ministers meeting among themselves (G4, G5, and G6), and larger groups of ministers (approximately 30) convened by the DG to negotiate breakthroughs in the negotiations, sometimes re- ferred to as the ‘ Green Room’. These smaller informal ministerial meetings have no legal status and any ‘breakthroughs’ arrived at in these must be taken to the broader membership for decision. World Trade Review (2009), 8 : 4, 579–605 Printed in the United Kingdom 579 at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1474745609990073 Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. University of Basel Library, on 11 Jul 2017 at 16:40:58, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available