Welcome to the GATT Digital Library. This site provides access to documents and information of and about the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), an organization that promoted international commerce and the reduction of trade barriers among member states from 1947-1994.
The GATT Digital Library site has been migrated from its original site, launched in April 2005, to this Stanford Library Exhibit as of September 2018. The layout and design have been updated, but access to the supporting information and documents still remains the same.
The World Trade Organization (WTO) also provides access to all of these documents through its GATT Documents website. The WTO site gives you the ability to browse the public documents by document symbol, by date, or via a downloadable catalogue that contains document symbols and document titles
The collection can be searched by keywords, document symbol, date, committee name.
The GATT Digital Library consists of two distinct collections of materials. The first being the digitized version of the GATT Official Documents held on microfiche within the Stanford University Libraries. This Documentation is primarily in English, with a small number of French and Spanish-language documents included. This collection is also referred to as the Derestricted documents on microfiche, Documents, GATT document, General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade documents.
The second collection of materials, GATT Publications, includes a small number of publications series that were not broadly disseminated during the organization's lifespan.
- Journal of the Preparatory Committee of the International Conference on Trade and Employment issued on daily basis during October-November 1946 included information useful to participants and historians of the Committee's work. Each issue included a list of meetings, summary records of proceedings, lists of documents distributed to participants and names of participants.
- The Legal Instruments series includes the GATT treaties and schedules related to the trade rounds. In addition they include protocols of modification and rectification to the schedules, along with protocols modifying treaty texts, accession instruments, and supplementary protocols. They are indexed and assigned volume numbers in the "GATT: Status of Legal Instruments" publication of the Legal Affairs Division.
- Press Releases (UN Conference on Trade and Employment / Interim Commission of the International Trade Organization) . This series was initiated and produced by the Department of Public Information for the Conference on Trade and Employment (Havana Conference). It was continued by the Information Centre of the United Nations Office at Geneva on behalf of the Interim Commission of the International Trade Organization (ICITO). The press releases contain statements and speeches by representatives to the conference, brief meeting summaries, biographies and other information vital to understanding the activities of the Conference and Interim Commission. A total of 628 releases were published between November 21, 1947 and September 30, 1948. The GATT Digital Library collection is incomplete, but a full set is found in the archives section of the United Nations Library in Geneva.Journal of the Preparatory Committee of the International Conference on Trade and Employment Legal Instruments