GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works Faculty Scholarship 2019 The Lost History of the ILO’s Trade Sanctions Steve Charnovitz George Washington University Law School,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.gwu.edu/faculty_publications Part of the Law Commons Recommended Citation Charnovitz, Steve, The Lost History of the ILO’s Trade Sanctions (2019). Steve Charnovitz, The Lost History of the ILO's Trade Sanctions, in ILO 100 - Law for Social Justice 217 (George P. Politakis, et al., eds., 2019); GWU Law School Public Law Research Paper No. 2019-74; GWU Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2019-74. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3505276 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Scholarship at Scholarly Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works by an authorized administrator of Scholarly Commons. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. 14 The Lost History of the ILO’s Trade Sanctions Steve Charnovitz* I. Introduction In 1994, the Report of the ILO Director‑General declared that one of the ‘premises’ on which the ILO is based is that it ‘should rely on cooper‑ ation rather than coercion in its efforts to promote social progress’.1 In line with that premise, the Report observed that the framers of the Constitution deliberately discarded all forms of coer‑ cion. Showing a great sense of realism, they concluded that recourse to constraints or sanctions would only discourage States from ratifying Conventions, or worse yet, from joining the Organization.2 When I read this statement in 1994 that the ILO’s framers had dis‑ carded coercion and sanctions, I knew it to be untrue because, several years earlier, I had written about how the framers, in 1919, had placed trade sanc‑ tions into the ILO’s Constitution.3 Over the years, my writings have occasionally discussed the ILO’s orig‑ inal enforcement system.