The Agreement on Safeguards

Abstract

The term “safeguard” or “safeguard measure” refers to trade measures that are applied to protect domestic industries from competition with imports causing or threatening to cause serious injury to them. Article XIX of the GATT and the WTO Agreement on Safeguards (hereinafter referred to as “the Safeguards Agreement” or “SA”) authorizes Members to impose significant import restrictions designed to remedy or prevent serious injury to domestic industries that is caused by an increase in imports. Such general safeguard measures are to be distinguished from other special safeguard measures, which are either applied only to a specific category of imported product2 or do not require the existence of injury to a particular domestic industry.