India Challenges Legality of E-Commerce Agreement at WTO

India has questioned the legality of the move by 66 World Trade Organisation member countries to bring the E-Commerce Agreement (ECA) into force at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) as a plurilateral pact, bypassing the global trade arbiter’s strict consensus rules. It disputed the role of WTO Director General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala in acting as the official depositary and circulator for an agreement that the WTO has not formally adopted. In a communication to the General Council – the highest decision-making body at the WTO comprising all members – India sought written responses to the issues it raised. “We further request that these questions and the responses thereto, be placed on the agenda of the GC for substantive discussion at its next meeting,” the communication said The E-commerce Agreement was initiated by 72 members in December 2017 as a plurilateral pact with its benefand obligations restricted only to those who wish to be a party to it. In December 2024, following five years of negotiations, the co-sponsors circulated the concluded text of the E-Commerce Agreement and sought a decision at the General Council to incorporate it into the WTO legal architecture. This required consensus from the entire WTO membership, which failed to materialize during two attempts in February and December 2025. Because full WTO integration failed, the participating countries bypassed the consensus block by setting up “interim arrangements” outside the formal Annex 4 framework to push the ECA toward entry into force. Annex 4 of the WTO contains the organization’s Plurilateral Trade Agreements On June 9, the countries pushing for the E-Commerce Agreement discussed bringing it into force by the middle of 2027. The 72 countries that first proposed the agreement include China , Japan, Australia, the US, the European Union and Korea. Through the ECA they aim to introduce the first global baseline rules on e-commerce, banning customs duties on electronic transmissions and facilitating paperless transactions, consumer protection, and cybersecurity. It also argued that servicing a non-WTO agreement utilizes shared resources for a subset of members without full permission. India also sought to know if the newly created E-Commerce Committee is a legitimate WTO body and questioned how it can operate within the WTO framework or use its dispute settlement mechanism without formal consensus.