NCCR - Panizzon Marion

Marion Panizzon is a Senior Research Fellow of the World Trade Institute and an adjunct lecturer in international economic law at the University of Berne. Since 2005, she is the Alternate Leader of the NCCR Trade Regulation Services Project (IP8) and since 2007 a Member of the MILE faculty at the WTI.

Marion received her bilingual (German/French) law degree from the University of Fribourg and her Masters in Law (LL.M.) from Duke Law School, Durham, NC. At Georgetown University Law Center Marion worked for Professor John Jackson's Institute of International Economic Law. Her doctoral thesis on 'Good Faith in the Jurisprudence of the WTO' (Hart Publishing, Oxford, 2006) was completed both at the Swiss Institute of Comparative Law, Lausanne, sponsored by a van Calker scholarship and at the University of Bern.

Marion's research interest is on cross-cutting issues of international economic law and emerging areas of transnational cooperation. She has co-edited the books "GATS and the International Regulation of Trade in Services (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2008) and Intellectual Property: Trade, Competition, and Sustainable Development (Michigan University Press, Ann Arbor, 2001) and published with the Berne-based team of the international project “Rights to Plant Genetic Resources” sponsored by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation.  A selection of Marion's publications can be downloaded from SSRN.

Drawing from her research results, Marion regulary collaborates with the International Center for Trade and Sustainable Development (ICTSD) the Institut du développement durable et des relations internationales (Iddri), iDEASCentre and the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES), Geneva. Most recently, she joined the Geneva Trade and Development Forum's as the responsible researcher for the labor mobility group. In summer 2008, Marion spent as a visiting scholar at Oxford University's Center on Migration Policy and Society (COMPAS).

Currently, she developing concepts on how to render the GATS mode 4 commitments to deliver more for migration-led development. Her research interest is thus to reassess the adequacy of GATS disciplines on mode 4 preferentialism and to redefine the structure and scope of GATS mode 4 commitments to replicate the co-responsible return-for-recruitment conditionality characterizing most preferentially organized labor mobility. As movement of workers is defined by both progress and protectionism in trade liberalization, Marion believes that redefined GATS mode 4 should and could intensify and steer labor migration internationally.

Research

Within IP 8 of the NCCR, Marion’s research mandate is to assess whether the GATS liberalization model of workers’ access to another WTO Members’ labour market, advances or not the recognition in international law of a right to migrate. If not multilaterally, such a right to migrate may develop bilaterally, through self-standing guest worker agreements and similar programmes within trade and non-trade treaties, or emerge through a proliferation of unilateral best practices of receiving countries. Identifying possible claims of non-violation nullification and impairment under WTO/GATS when human rights violations offset the negotiated level of liberalized services commitments of WTO Member countries is a related field of interest.

          1. Identify unilateral best practices of receiving countries for attracting foreign labour and sending countries’ initiatives encourage return migration. This research project is being conducted in cooperation with ICTSD, Geneva. A sample set of receiving and sending countries is being defined.

          2. Describe the Swiss experience with bilateral labour market agreements and/or guest worker programmes are tailored for recruiting high (and low?) skilled foreign labour. Assess areas of conflict and convergence between the free movement clause in the bilateral agreements with the EU and the pre-existing bilateral guest worker programmes of the 1960s and 1970s with Portugal, Greece, Spain and Italy. This research draws from input of the Swiss Federal Office of Migration. It is being conducted together with IP 8 Leader Pierre Sauvé and IP 8 affiliated expert institutions.

          3. Resolve whether beyond their positive legal obligations to liberalize market access to foreign service suppliers in conjunction with their respective horizontal and specific mode 4 commitments and, thus, to limitedly recognize a right to labour migration, WTO Members also have the obligation to protect such a migrant worker’s other human rights, namely those related to the service supplying activity and movement abroad (right to unionize, right to family reunification)?

          4. Draft policy recommendation constructing an effective multilateral bargaining position between the negotiating interests of developing countries in access to industrialized countries’ labour markets services by trading-off opening industrialized country markets to free movement of high and low-skilled workers under the TMNP/Mode 4 against affording industrialized country services enhanced market access in developing countries for the banking, insurance and tourism industries.