Short Course: Digital Trade Law

This course takes place on 4, 11, 18 March 2027.

The fee for this course is CHF 800.

The course explores the dynamic field of digital trade law. It offers a deep understanding of the topic of digital trade, as well as of the emergent regulatory framework that governs it. This includes the rules of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the lapse of the moratorium on customs duties on electronic transmissions at the 14th WTO Ministerial Conference (March 2026) and the new plurilateral Agreement on Electronic Commerce, as well as the detailed framework of rules developed in preferential trade agreements (PTAs). The course covers in this latter sense major agreements, such as the CPTPP, the USMCA, the RCEP, the EU–UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement and the new EU Digital Trade Agreements and gives a clear sense of the positioning of the key stakeholders within the preferential trade landscape and under the WTO Joint Initiative on E-Commerce and the resulting Agreement on Electronic Commerce.

It also explores the new generation of Digital Economy Agreements (DEAs) as legal innovation in the domain of digital trade regulation and as a new model of international cooperation in a technologically fluid environment. While the focus of the course is on global trade law, it also explores the important interfaces with domestic data governance regimes and the contestations around digital trade and privacy; digital trade and cybersecurity; digital trade and human rights; digital trade and sustainability, as well as data inequalities and the development dimension of global digital trade rulemaking. The course also covers developments in anticipation of changing national rule-frameworks on artificial intelligence (AI) and keeps up-to-date with the relevance of both WTO rules and relevant PTA provisions in this domain.