ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests the idea of a blanket prohibition of trade sanctions to affect other countries' policies and advocates a more subtle legal and institutional approach to the relationship between trade, environment, and labor rights. It proposes a normative framework for disaggregating and evaluating "fair trade" claims relating to labor and environmental standards. Environmentalists and labor rights activists may advocate trade sanctions as a means of inducing recalcitrant governments and/or firms to meet a given set of labor or environmental standards. In the case of the environment, examples of transboundary externalities abound, whether these are conceived of in the traditional sense as spillovers or whether they concern effects on the global environmental commons. Some human rights abuses and some labor practices, particularly violent suppression of workers' rights to organize or associate, may lead to the kind of acute social conflict that gives rise to general political and economic instability.
