Self-help by statute Brazil’s economic reciprocity law and the unmaking of multilateral discipline

Abstract

Brazil’s Economic Reciprocity Law (Law 15,122/2025) authorises the federal government to adopt trade, investment and
intellectual property countermeasures against States whose unilateral acts are deemed to harm Brazilian interests, without awaiting any ruling or authorisation from the World Trade Organization. This article argues that the statute is best understood as the terminus of a fifteen-year progression (from Law 12,270/2010, through Provisional Measure 1,098/2022, to the 2025 law) by which Brazilian retaliation has been progressively detached from the multilateral system that was once its precondition. Measured against the discipline against self-help in Article 23 of the Dispute Settlement Understanding, the law occupies an uncomfortable
position: in the category of cases where it plainly engages benefits owed under WTO agreements, it codifies the very unilateralism that Article 23 was written to prevent; its broadest triggers leave the determination of wrongfulness to Brazil alone; and its most legally exposed remedy, the suspension of intellectual property rights, lawful when authorised by the system, becomes a source of legal exposure when self-administered. The deeper difficulty is strategic rather than doctrinal: by normalising the unilateral countermeasure, a middle power whose protection rests on the strength of rules erodes the very discipline that shields it.