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GATT documents

On 15 May 2006 the General Council decided to make public all official documents issued under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Many of these documents did not exist electronically, and have been scanned to create a digital archive. This is a work in progress — cataloguing is not completed, and refinements to structure and help files will be added at a later date. Of the roughly 88,000 documents issued under GATT, about 51,000 are available through the links below.


See also:

Press release: WTO makes public all official GATT documents
 
General Council Meeting of 15 May 2006 (part VI)


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GATT documents are identified by a “symbol” or code which is based on either the issuing body or subject matter of the document. Unlike WTO document symbols, GATT symbols are not hierarchical.

A B C D E F G H I J K L   
M N O P Q R S T U V W XYZ 1-7

Documents for which no link appears are not available electronically
  

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  Undated*

 
1946-50 1951-55 1956-60 1961-65 1966-70 1971-75
1976-80 1981-85 1986-90 1991-95 1996-00  

* Documents for which no date could be identified have been given a nominal date of 1/1/1940  
  

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To do this you need to download the catalogue file part 1 (5MB), part 2 (5MB), part 3 (5MB), part 4 (5MB), part 5 (5MB). You can then use the local search function of your browser to search within titles/symbols by typing Ctrl-F and entering your search term.
  

Other sources of GATT documents    back to top

  • A subset of GATT documents (including those from the Uruguay Round — about 4000 documents) is available in Documents Online. Click “Advanced search”, type “UR” into the collection field, then refine your search with other criteria if desired.

help with downloading these documents

  • Stanford University Library scanned much of the GATT collection and makes the documents available through their website with a search engine.

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  Document formats

  
Documents exist in varying formats, depending on age and source and method of scanning.
Paper versions of all official GATT documents can be consulted in the WTO archives, which are located on the 4th floor of the WTO Library.

PDF scan — image only
What you see on your screen or printout is simply a scanned image of the paper document.

PDF scan with OCR
In addition to the scanned image this type of PDF file contains text which is searchable. This is a useful addition, but the text recognition is imperfect, so what you see and print is still the scanned image of the paper document.

HTML — these are basic web page conversions in which most formatting is lost.

RFT/DCA and WPF — these are old word processor formats. You will need a converter to open them in Word. > More info
  

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