General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
GATT Final Act signed in Geneva
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Original prompt & settings (JSON) ↗Twenty-three delegations signed — but only six governments completed the separate signatures that gave GATT any legal footing at all. The treaty itself never definitively entered into force.
Two documents, not one
On 30 October 1947 representatives of 23 contracting parties signed the Final Act of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade in Geneva, authenticated in only two languages, English and French.
Six of them — Belgium, Canada, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States — also signed the Protocol of Provisional Application that day. Australia and France, originally expected to sign then, were given until 15 November.
No GATT rules took effect from the Final Act signatures alone.
What the package contained
The signed package combined trade rules with tariff schedules produced by the first Geneva tariff negotiations: about 45,000 tariff concessions covering roughly US$10 billion in trade, then about one-fifth of world trade.
The protocol committed its participants to begin provisional application on 1 January 1948.
Provisional for half a century
GATT 1947 never entered definitively into force as a treaty; it operated through provisional application. Official summaries that say it was 'signed by 23 countries' and 'entered into force' in 1948 compress that distinction.
The International Trade Organization had not already failed at this point: the Havana conference opened the following month and its charter was signed in March 1948, before failing to win US ratification.
The GATT 1947 legal instruments were terminated on 1 January 1996; the legally distinct GATT 1994 now governs trade in goods within the WTO.
Sources
Researched 24 Aug 2026 6 sources not yet audited
How this was checked
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What the sources leave uncertain
- Official summaries often say that GATT was simply “signed” by 23 countries and “entered into force” on 1 January 1948. Legally, the 23 signed its Final Act, while provisional application rested on a separate protocol; GATT 1947 never entered definitively into force.