The Foundation of the ASEAN Economic Community

Stefano Inama is a Chief and trade lawyer at UNCTAD. He has been responsible for the preferences and trade laws section in UNCTAD and Coordinator of UNCTAD commercial diplomacy program. He has also provided trade policy advice for the last twenty years to Governments during the WTO negotiations and the implementation aspects of WTO agreements, as well as during negotiations of Free Trade Agreements such as the ASEAN-China, EU-South Africa, SADC and the Tripartite Free Trade area as well as FTA negotiations of Latin American and Caribbean countries with the EU. He is the author of Rules of Origin in International Trade (Cambridge University Press, 2009). Edmund W. Sim is a partner at Appleton Luff, Singapore and an Adjunct Associate Professor at National University of Singapore Law School, where he created the world's first course on ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) law. He has participated in more than 200 trade remedy proceedings and has advised government ministries on antidumping and countervailing duty laws, rules of origin, free trade agreements, and investment laws and their consistency with the WTO agreements.