In 1997, WTO members agreed on services-related protocols in financial services and telecommunications in which the benefits were extended to all WTO members.

Other types of agreements are closed and only apply to the signatories. Such pacts are allowable under so-called Annex 4 rules. Originally, there were only four such accords, but two have expired. The remaining two are the Government Procurement Agreement which has 49 members and came into force in 1981³ and the Agreement on Trade in Civil Aircraft which has 33 members and entered into force in 1980.⁴

These two were completed before the WTO came into being, though they are very active and continue to attract other members. Because of the closed nature of these agreements, were they to be pursued under the current WTO arrangements, a consensus of WTO members would be required for them to come into force. This is how India, South Africa, and Turkey were able to block the 127 WTO members who tried in Abu Dhabi to bring the Investment Facilitation for Development Agreement into the WTO rule book.

But the Domestic Regulation in Services agreement struck in 2021 by 67 WTO Members will enter into force because its legal status is different. All parties to the pact made specific pledges in their “schedule of commitments”, through which they outlined their legally binding assurances to the others seeking to operate in services markets. Once these schedules were certified, they became binding and the agreement entered into force this way.

The ironclad guarantees under the GATS agreement which enable members to improve their schedules shielded them from efforts to derail the deal. Stopping this accord would require challenging each schedule and proving that Indian and South African interests had been adversely affected. Given the facilitating nature of the services, this left the obstructionists on shaky legal ground. Nonetheless, it’s still an “open” agreement vulnerable to obstructionism. South Africa and India have held up the “certification” of the schedules of 17 members, effectively forcing these 17 out of an agreement they would like to join.⁵