One of the purposes of the “WTO Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (SPS Agreement)” is to control health-based barriers. To achieve such goal, the SPS Agreement relies on the scientific justification as a benchmark to distinguish legitimate health-based barriers from illegitimate ones. There are, however, situations where the scientific findings are not adequate. Many commentators believe that the precautionary principle is an appropriate tool enabling the Member states to take appropriate actions in responding to such situations. They refer to Article 5.7 of the SPS Agreement where allows the Member states to adopt sanitary or phytosanitary measures on the basis of available pertinent information, in cases where relevant scientific evidence is insufficient. The issue not being clear in Article 5.7 is the requirements under which the Member states could adopt a trade-restrictive measure on the basis of precautionary principle. This paper tries to address this issue by a contextual analysis of Article 5.7. For this purpose, the essay considers four requirements contained in Article 5.7. This paper concludes in overall, although these requirements create legal ambiguities in some cases, they could be of assistance where the markets are unnecessarily closed.

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