¿́¿More than twenty-five years have passed since the inception of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the multilateral trading system as we know it today. It has been a period of profound experiences in the management of trade policy under the surveillance of a multilateral institution and in the settlement of disputes between WTO Members. No new regulatory developments of the same scope as those resulting from the Uruguay Round have emerged again. However, it has been a period of extensive knowledge development and learning in the interpretation and application of existing multilateral obligations arising from the many WTO agreements, including the Agreement on Safeguards and Article XIX of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade 1994 (GATT 1994). This fact is of the greatest importance to the system, particularly for the purpose of market access concessions and the definition of the space that national authorities can avail themselves of in defining protective actions. The WTO safeguard mechanism is the legitimate vehicle provided by the multilateral rules for the temporary adjustment of trade concessions or negotiated outcomes in the light of the demands of local industry under extraordinary circumstances. The Agreement on Safeguards is the main multilateral regulatory regime for the processing of safeguard requests in a safeguard investigation, the application of safeguard measures and their eventual extensions, possible rebalancing of concessions as a result of the application of those measures, and the multilateral exchanges with respect to decisive actions. The Agreement on Safeguards serves a vital role as it enables Members to accommodate their national industrial concerns, and weigh and balance the value of the concessions they made with new concessions that they would have to give in return¿́¿-- Provided by publisher.