NAFTA Article 104 lists seven international environmental agreements, and agrees that they will trump NAFTA in the case of disagreement. The seven IEAs are the following:

• The Montreal Protocol;
• The Basel Convention (when all three parties have ratified);
• CITES; and
• Four bilateral treaties.

This seems a step in the right direction—how to deal with IEAs is a topic of great controversy in the WTO. But NAFTA parties are all signatories to these agreements, and much of the WTO controversy is over disputes between signatories and non-signatories.

And then there is the fine print. The domestic laws resulting from these IEAs must be those "least inconsistent with the other provisions of [NAFTA]." So a party would have to show that a challenged measure could not have been somehow "better," or more consistent with NAFTA. But the more NAFTA-consistent alternative does not need to be politically or economically feasible.

7.2 The European Union