NTU College of Law Debate Team Won Championship in the Asia Regional Round of the 7th ELSA Moot Court Competition on WTO Law

The NTU College of Law's Asia Center for WTO Health Law and Policy (hereinafter referred to as the WTO Center) has hosted the Asia Regional Round of ELSA's Moot Court Competition on WTO Law for four consecutive years. Starting from this year, South East Asian countries (the whole Asia) are included in the competition, with a total of ten teams (two from Taiwan, others from Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, India, Vietnam, Philippines, Indonesia) participating in the regional competition.

The theme of this year's Asia Regional Competition was "Biofuel trade and environmental protection", which was aimed at exploring the issues of free trade and environmental protection related to bio-fuels. The secretarial affairs for this competition was handled by a team led by Mr. Chin-Fu Lin, who serves as an assistant at the WTO Center. The team members included Miss Tsai-Ping Tang, Miss Ruo-yun Tu, Miss Ruo-lang Wen, and Academic Advisior Miss Letizia Raxchella-Sergi, who worked together to invite domestic and international judges, planned the agenda, and arranged foreign debate teams to come to Taiwan. The competition was held from March 25th to 28th in Taipei and brought to a successful conclusion.

The NTU debate team was comprised of four graduate students from the Institute of Law, who were: Mr. Jian Fei li, Mr. Hsien Wu, Miss Yu-shan Kao, and Miss Wei-Jeng Hong. These four team members were collectively given guidance by Professor Tsai-Yu Lin (an external consultant for the WTO Center), and by Student Coaches Mr. Ding Jin and Mr. Yueh-ping Yang. During the six-month preparation period, the team members demonstrated exceptional endurance by taking care of their heavy course work loads while rehearsing for the competition at the same time. At the end, the NTU team pulled off a stunning performance by winning the regional championship and the best respondent written submission award, and team members Mr. Jian-fei Li and Mr. Hsien Wu won the Best Orator Award in the elimination round and the preliminary round to boot.

The NTU WTO Center will host this year's World Moot Court Competition for the first time. Over the years this is the first time that the World Moot Court Competition is held outside of Geneva. NTU's debate team will compete with 20 teams from Japan, Hong Kong, India, Europe, North America, Latin America, and the Oceania countries in the World Moot Court Competition to be held from May 19th to 23rd in Taipei in an attempt to win the top honor—that is, world championship!!