Chère Gabrielle,

You have been a vivacious, positive, grounded and stalwart colleague over many years. I’m delighted that David and Geneviève should be publishing this tribute publication in your honour and especially happy to write this short piece for inclusion.

As many readers will know, Gabrielle has contributed centrally to the vital and development of a sustained link between academia and the bureaucracy of the World Trade Organization (WTO), invigorating discussion and dialogue on the issues of the day and on overarching institutional and ideological changes in international trade regulation. This is no less than a contribution that has helped to change history. Through the energy invested by Gabrielle and colleagues, the WTO has become a more open organisation, and this has immeasurably enhanced academic work and in turn helped feed into the evolution of the WTO itself. Gabrielle and others have achieved all this while respecting the limitations of their roles as international civil servants, which is much to be admired.

As with Gabrielle, my own career has spanned government and academic work. In the mid 1990s, this provided the opportunity to appreciate at first hand the extraordinary event that took place with the founding of the WTO. Over this decade I was with the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade. The change was profound, particularly in terms of the legal work required to deal with what was now a fully-fledged international dispute settlement system. Meantime the WTO Secretariat had expanded and the institutional lawyers’ work had taken off.

Visiting the WTO in the early 2000s, I met Gabrielle for the first time, as well as valued colleagues including Gretchen Stanton, Joost Pauwelyn, Thomas Cottier and Peter Van den Bossche. Their breadth of insights into international trade and its social, developmental and environmental dimensions was apparent. Though the technical aspects of their roles at the WTO demanded a coalface engagement, they were also outward-facing, and willing to share broader insights into the issues on which they worked in real world terms.

Gabrielle was among those who so kindly engaged with my primary research interest at the time, which was in the rules of evidence in scientific disputes and international courts and tribunals, including on expert evidence, burden of proof and finality of decision-making with reference to the precautionary principle, later published with Cambridge University Press. She and I were both interested subsequently to see judges at the International Court of Justice draw directly on the WTO’s experience with scientific cases when considering the potential advancement of the Court’s own practice in the case concerning *Pulp Mills on the River Uruguay (Argentina v Uruguay)*<fnref n="1" /> in 2010. Considerable discussion has continued to follow on this topic, both in academia and in practice, and across broader fields of international dispute settlement, including under the *United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea*<fnref n="2" />.

Gabrielle became a steadfast ally when preparing journal articles for publication, always well familiar with the evolving jurisprudence and practice, and ready to contribute her academic perspectives, including on trade and environmental matters more broadly. Meantime in addition to her variety of roles in the WTO Secretariat, including as Counsellor in the Cabinet of DG Pascal Lamy from 2005 to 2010, Gabrielle supervised over the years numerous University of Geneva doctoral students.

In 2012 she took on the presidency of the newly established Society of International Economic Law (SIEL), and I well recall the Society’s prior inaugural conference in 2008 in Geneva at the Centre on Trade and Economic Integration and Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies. In this capacity Gabrielle made a further major enduring contribution, and she continues her involvement with SIEL today. Meantime Gabrielle has sustained a high-quality research output of her own on topics of great relevance for International Trade Law and global relations. Among her welcome publications is also the important 2015 edited collection marking the 20<sup>th</sup> anniversary of the WTO: *A History of Law and Lawyers in the GATT/WTO: The Development of the Rule of Law in the Multilateral Trading System*.

Professor Marceau has been a delightful and generous colleague throughout these decades. We exchanged Christmas cards for many years, though the need to reduce carbon emissions has now to be taken into account. Visiting Geneva when developing my recently published monograph on emerging global regulatory standards such as due regard, due diligence and what are often called standards of review, I gained a few glimpses of how she has managed to achieve so much. Gabrielle is “live” on the throughput of communications across all dimensions of her professional life from the start of the waking day until done. This has included all aspects of her many roles, down to arranging for academic colleagues to visit the WTO library and far beyond.

Today we are able to benefit from the insights that Gabrielle’s dedication to such a full and lifetime involvement with the multilateral trade regime has rendered, in the context of growing 21<sup>st</sup>-century challenges. In a recent interview she explained that for her the WTO is far from the traditional conception of an organisation concerned purely with commerce, and is rather a governance forum where governments talk about the many interrelated problems faced in the world today, conveying experiences and understandings, ideas and proposals.

There is much to ponder in relation to the WTO’s future, as the new US presidency continues to implement confronting trade measures, and the MPIA continues to substitute as WTO’s partial appellate mechanism. Even with Director General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala at the helm, progress is hard to achieve in the areas most important for the developing world. Even with global temperatures on track to exceed the Paris Agreement’s consensus targets, progress is slow in revolutionising international trade rules in the ways necessary to combat climate change and look after the global environment. Addressing the egregious levels of subsidisation in the fossil fuel sector is a standup priority, together with strengthening the fisheries subsidies regime. Development of a circular global trade economy, rapid liberalisation in environmental goods and services, alterations in the discrimination disciplines and the general exceptions, and in the rules on subsidies, can all help to power the transition away from carbon. Deeper questions remain, such as the political dynamics that impede movement forward, as well as the measure in which International Trade Law might move beyond the strong, neoliberal orientation that has previously been dominant.

Sectoral, bilateral, regional and plurilateral developments speak diversely to the interlayered economic challenges. Access to food and basic labour conditions join the imperatives associated with the pollution and conservation crisis. Gabrielle’s recent engagement with our current Universities of Auckland and Bristol six-continent international research initiative on Seeking Sustainability: Food, Trade, Labour and Environment is a wonderful example of her ongoing commitment to International Trade Law writ whole and large. The legacy that Gabrielle and other colleagues in the WTO secretariat have left is to demonstrate the difference that can be made by real human beings at the heart of a global bureaucracy concerned with matters central to human living worldwide.

Gabrielle, we are grateful and wish you all the best in retirement.

<footnote n="1">*Pulp Mills on the River Uruguay (Argentina v Uruguay)*, Judgment [2010] ICJ Rep 14.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">*United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea*, 10 December 1982, 1833 UNTS 3 (entered into force 16 November 1994).</footnote>