01 April 2024
One Health – One Welfare – One Rights
The projected WHO Pandemic Agreement, as currently under negotiation, will most likely contain a detailed prescription of a One Health approach (Art. 1(d) and Art. 5 of the INB negotiating text of 30 October 2023). This contribution examines the legal potential of a One Health approach for laws and policies towards animals raised, kept, and slaughtered for providing meat, milk, fur, and other body products for human consumption. My main argument will be that, taken seriously, the idea of One health defies a hierarchy between the health of humans, animals, and ecosystems. The inner logic of One Health is to exploit the positive feedback loops between safeguarding human, animal, and ecosystem health. This approach should modify the still prevailing unreflected and unchecked prioritisation of measures in favour of human health at the expense of and to the detriment of animal health and life. I will illustrate my claim with two policy examples. Continue reading >>
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29 March 2024
The Future of Pathogen Access and Benefit Sharing under International Law
The sharing of pathogen samples and their associated genetic sequence data (GSD) is crucial for global pandemic prevention, preparedness and response. It enables global surveillance, risk assessment and the research and development of pandemic-related products. The sharing of related benefits is also seen as key to ensuring more equitable global access to the fruits of science. These issues, collectively known as Pathogen Access and Benefit Sharing (PABS), remain a major point of contention in the ongoing Pandemic Agreement negotiations. In this post, I explore potential scenarios regarding the establishment or absence of the new PABS System, and their implications under international law. Continue reading >>28 March 2024
Power and Distribution in Global Health Governance
Since at least the 1980s, private actors and market-based mechanisms have played an increasingly important role in the provision of public goods and services and the pursuit of public policy objectives in general. A market approach is also widely used in the field of public health. In effect, the PPP approach, as illustrated by COVAX, can work to structurally protect the interests of (a majority) of the high-income countries. While PPPs in global health may do a lot of good things, their private law, contractualist nature and structures safeguard formal state sovereignty and voluntarism, predominantly benefitting high-income donor countries Continue reading >>
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26 March 2024
The Silent Disintegration of Global Health Governance?
With an estimated 6,9 million deaths and with its enormous scale of economic, social and political collateral damages, the COVID-19 Pandemic has created excessive momentum for re-considering the rules and procedures governing global health – or has it? In this blog contribution, I will discuss the promises and pitfalls of current law-making and law-amending efforts that seek to strengthen pandemic governance post COVID-19 by reflecting on three distinct features of global health as an area of international cooperation. Continue reading >>
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26 March 2024
Towards Equity and Decolonization?
The COVID-19 pandemic exposed systemic problems in the global health system. It revealed that the global health system perpetuates global health inequalities rather than effectively reducing them: The international community, particularly the countries of the Global North, failed to make COVID-19 vaccines widely available to the populations of the world's poorest countries. This blog debate takes stock of the reform debate about a just and decolonizing transformation of the health system. Bringing together scholars from various disciplines, the contributions of this debate ask what a fair global health system could look like and what role the law plays in it. Continue reading >>
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02 November 2021
The Covid-19 Pandemic, the Failure of the Binary PHEIC Declaration System, and the Need for Reform
The COVID-19 pandemic has raised unprecedented challenges for the global health framework and its long-term consequences are not yet in full sight. The alarm mechanism based on the declaration of Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC), in particular, has been severely tested. As underlined by some scholars, a reform of the PHEIC’s mechanism would not solve the core issues of the alert and response system behind the IHRs, that do have mainly a political dimension. Continue reading >>
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26 October 2021
Towards Member-driven International Pandemic Lawmaking
The COVID-19 pandemic has blatantly exposed the flaws of the World Health Organization (WHO) and its International Health Regulations (IHR) in addressing cross-border communicable diseases. We argue that the IHR is ill-designed: its rules and mechanisms are disproportionately tied to the Director General’s (DG) exercise of power, rendering insufficient member access to and participation in core decision-making and greater tendency of regulatory capture. Continue reading >>
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28 May 2021
Masks, vaccines, and investment promises
When the WHO declared a pandemic on March 11, 2020, the spread of the virus was already under control in China. Ever since Beijing has been engaging in widespread health diplomacy. China aims to promote the image of China as a “responsible great power” and of Western states in as powers in decline that are unable to provide solutions for complex international affairs. Continue reading >>
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21 March 2020
Taiwan’s Fight against COVID-19: Constitutionalism, Laws, and the Global Pandemic
Taiwan has demonstrated to the world its strength and success in combating the spread of COVID-19 despite decades of exclusion from the World Health Organization (WHO) and ongoing bullying from the People’s Republic of China (China). Given its geographical proximity and close economic exchanges with China, Taiwan was estimated to be heavily hit by the spread of COVID-19 originated from Wuhan, China. Reversing the trend, Taiwan has maintained a considerably low number of confirmed cases, and detected most cases of possible community spread, while Europe, the United States and the rest of the world are struggling with an ongoing global pandemic. Continue reading >>06 March 2020