The World Trade Organization decided Monday to investigate the tariffs Washington slapped on $250 billion worth of Chinese goods, as the two countries prepare to meet for renewed trade talks. The WTO's Dispute Settlement Body (DSB) has agreed to establish an expert panel to review US President Donald Trump's decision to hit China with tariffs on a quarter of a trillion dollars' worth of goods, according to a Geneva trade official with insight into the case.

The DSB accepted Monday to launch the probe after China filed a second request for its case to be heard. Under WTO regulations, parties in a dispute can block a first request for the creation of an arbitration panel, but if the parties make a second request, it is all but guaranteed to go through.

China's representative told the assembly Monday that the tariffs imposed last year were "a blatant breach of the United States' obligations under the WTO agreements and is posing a systemic challenge to the multilateral trading system." The US representative meanwhile slammed the Chinese request for a WTO probe as "entirely hypocritical", pointing to the "discriminatory duties on over $100 billion in US exports" imposed by China.

At the same time, the representative added, creating a panel was useless since China "has already taken the unilateral decision that the US measures cannot be justified, and China has already imposed tariff measures on US goods" in retaliation.

Copyright Agence France-Presse, 2019