The WTO and its principles The World Trade Organization, located in Geneva, Switzerland, was created in 1995. It is the successor to the Secretariat established to administer the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). GATT 1947 was originally signed by twenty-three countries (the so-called “contracting parties”) and provided the foundation for a series of multilateral negotiations on reducing trade barriers. The Uruguay Round, the seventh in the series, was concluded in 1994 and yielded the agreements that currently govern international trade. As of July 2009 the WTO had 153 members; a further twenty-nine countries are in accession negotiations. A new round of WTO trade negotiations was launched in Doha, Qatar in November 2001 under the title of the Doha Development Agenda (DDA).