International Organizations Law Review

The World Health Organization (WHO) declared novel coronavirus (COVID-19) as a worldwide pandemic that has caused in high number of deaths in many countries and across national boundaries. In its early stage, governments all over the world have decided to implement lockdowns and closing of national border as ad hoc measures to slow down the drastic increase of the widespread of Covid-19. The United Nations through the UN General Assembly at its 74 th session adopted Resolution on Global solidarity to fight COVID-19 recognized that this pandemic requires a global response based on unity, solidarity and renewed multilateral cooperation. The UN General Assembly passed under resolution on international cooperation to ensure global access to medicines, vaccines and medical equipment to face Covid-19 pandemic. This article is divided into three parts; the background of the current health security regulatory system under the International Health Regulations (IHR) 2005; the pursuance of pandemic treaty sponsored by WHO and 26 countries from Europe, Latin America and Asia and its justifications and the challenges ahead in resolving world pandemic regulatory system. The IHR aims for international collaboration "to prevent, protect against, control, and provide a public health response to the international spread of disease in ways that are commensurate with and restricted to public health risks and that avoid unnecessary interference with international traffic and trade". There is a need to design a compulsory mechanism for alert to act much earlier and the alert system must be a build in compulsory mechanism. The compliance can only be made possible through the availability of coordination platform between WHO and other international organization like IMO, WTO and ICAO. Thirdly, United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) must play the vital role in giving the mandate to WHO to implement the coordination with other international organization. Hence, member states must therefore, give their political commitment in ensuring the successful coordination with other international agencies.

Geopolitical Monitor, 2020

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit the world, ensuing events surpassed the worst expectations in the shortest time span imagined. It appeared that humanity was not ready to face the next pandemic that caught it unawares. The magnitude and the speed of the contagion has turned great geopolitical swathes into quarantines zones, and lockdowns have already taken a toll on economic activity, along with the physical and mental health of millions of people. The countries hardest hit by the virus, such as the United States, Italy, Spain, France despite their efforts to contain the spread, had to nonetheless witness surges in the number of total deaths, while their healthcare facilities remain overloaded with patients. Discussions on the flattening curve come and go, depending on the daily indicators of infected and passed patients. Amid the throes of the pandemic, some European states and the United States have hinted at a readiness to ease restrictions and slowly get on with some normalcy, though this intent did not go unchallenged by those who believe it might yet be too early to relax. While scholars find themselves in heated debates about the impending changes of the post-pandemic era, with some heralding the complete shift of the global world order and others arguing against it and making their cases for a gradual return to normalcy, there is a limbo that

Crisis of Multilateralism? Challenges and Resilience, 2023

Because of its multidimensional nature, its global scale and the magnitude of measures taken by government and international organizations, the Covid-19 pandemic severely challenged global health multilateralism in 2020. It acted both as a revealer of long-term trends in global health cooperation and as a catalyst of the changes that it precipitated. This chapter will show that if the Covid-19 pandemic appeared as a crisis with the potential to reorder global health multilateralism, it did so precisely because it occurred in an environment marked by fault lines and an accumulation of incremental change. Through this perspective, it will provide a broad overview of the dynamics of health multilateralism and help identify the challenges created by this specific crisis. We will first briefly analyze the historical dynamics of global health multilateralism that led to a fragmented system of cooperation on both the organizational and the normative levels. We will then focus on the tensions and challenges created by the Covid-19 pandemic, which partly explain why it is often perceived as a major crisis. Finally, we will address new developments in global health multilateralism, and how they relate to previous dynamics.

Srpska politička misao

In the European Union, healthcare and public health are mostly within the competence of Member States. Still, in a number of sub-domains, coordination between Member States led to the adoption of legislation that formed the healthcare acquis, together with a whole set of programs and initiatives aimed at improving public health within the Union. The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) was formed in 2004 to help EU institutions and Member States identify and assess the risk of current and emerging threats to human health from communicable diseases. At the end of July 2020, Member States reached a general agreement on the recovery plan, but the final agreement had not been adopted by the end of the year. On the other hand, in the spring of 2020, EU launched a global action for universal access to tests, treatments and vaccines against coronavirus and for global recovery, while in October 2020, it presented the strategies on vaccine allocation and additional Covid...

JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies, 2021

Sociology of Health & Illness

COMMENTARY 35 years have tested its competence in public health because decisions in this realm depend heavily on agreement among the member states. As the European Community grew from 6 states into a Union of 27, that agreement became harder to achieve, not least because national governments preferred to address social issues domestically (Greer et al., 2019: 29). Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) in cattle was the first health threat to challenge European unity (Judt, 2001). In 1996, despite years of British denials, "mad cow disease" was linked to human health creating alarm about food safety across Europe. The German government finally agreed to slaughter its suspect cattle in order to control the outbreak within its borders only on condition that Brussels would share the $300 million bill. But the European Community budget was dependent on member states' contributions, and countries like Finland, which claimed that its herds were BSE-free, were reluctant to finance what they termed Germany's complacency. Europe had limited powers to enforce its injunctions: even when the Commission lifted its embargo on the export of British beef, France refused to remove its ban. Yet the BSE crisis had significant effects on the European governance of health: it increased public distrust of EU food safety regulation (Lynch & Vogel, 2001: 25) and agricultural policy and revealed that economic and political interests could trump health considerations and give rise to regulatory capture. This experience brought changes, namely an overhaul of the "ad hoc approach" to food regulation (Vos, 2000), the establishment in 2002 of a new regulatory agency, the European Food Safety Authority (Vincent, 2004), and the promotion of the precautionary principle in risk regulation-that "the absence of scientific certainty no longer justifies delaying the introduction of measures that could prevent potential harm" (Noiville, 2006: 307). The next significant test case for European governance was the appearance in 2004-2006 of a potential pandemic-avian flu, which is extremely virulent in poultry and was transmitted to humans (mainly children, through backyard poultry) in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand. There was little person-to-person transfer of the disease, but the suspicion that viral mutation might create it caused global panic. This time vaccines and treatments were the issue that put pressure on European solidarity. Several EU countries generated pre-orders for influenza vaccines but declared that they would impose export limitations on vaccines manufactured within their borders (Bielitzki, 2007: 61). In the event, the pandemic did not materialize, but efforts to mobilize a collective response were unsuccessful. The EU Commission proposed the creation of a strategic stockpile of antiviral drugs, but three member states disagreed and most of the others refused to fund it, with the result that "each country must act for itself" (Ljunggren, 2006). The H1N1 or "swine flu" epidemic in 2009 saw similar resistance to sharing vaccines and medications and concern about this lack of cooperation produced an EU joint procurement mechanism 5 years later to provide for "medical countermeasures for different categories of cross-border health threats" (European Commission, 2014). Framework contracts for (only) pandemic influenza vaccines were signed in March 2019, but many member states did not sign up immediately to this voluntary mechanism (European Commission, 2019). The threat of avian flu did lead to calls for "pandemic preparedness," but readiness entails preparation of a certain kind. That has become evident in the context of the current pandemic. Take ventilators, for example: when the coronavirus arrived, no European country had enough to meet the challenge except perhaps Germany, and it had to order an additional 10,000 ventilators from a domestic supplier (Buck & Ghiglione, 2020). Being prepared on this front would have required three things. The first is advance planning. But anticipating the need for equipment such as ventilators, and then budgeting for that need, is not a simple matter: these are expensive machines; they require maintenance and also trained staff-respiratory therapists-to operate them. Keeping enough on hand, therefore, entails both ongoing expenditure and manpower planning. In March it was revealed that none of the UK Government's key preparedness plans for pandemic influenza,

EGPA 2023 CONFERENCE, 2023

Mr Christian ROQUES, Deputy Director-General, European Commission - Directorate-General for Human Resources and Security, Chairman CPQS /Mr Costas POPOTAS, Head of Unit, Establishment of entitlements and Payroll, Court of Justice of the EU, CPQS member From the first appearance of the Covid-19 virus in Europe at the end of January 2020 onwards, up to its rapid expansion a few weeks later, the European institutions were trying to assess the risks on the basis of their previous experiences and the business continuity plans elaborated and constantly updated since the previous virus alerts. If it is true that the reactions to the new virus were modelled on the previous SARS and MERS alerts, since the impact of the latter was not felt beyond Asia and the Arabic peninsula, things changed as the situation aggravated. As several European states started confining people, the EU institutions launched themselves into updating their crisis plans to ensure business continuity with the implementation of novel responses and protective measures in several domains that were not necessarily taken into account in previous assessments of risks. And despite all, the preparedness established via the previous continuity plans, untested maybe under real circumstances, proved well dimensioned to the final extent of the pandemics and its persistence. Throughout this unprecedented crisis, the EU institutions remained alert to the slightest change and overcoming the wish to come back to normal have proved resilient and adaptive. Nevertheless, because of the extraterritorial character of the EU administration, measures concerning its personnel had to be established, in close collaboration with Member States certainly, albeit in full autonomy. The coordination of administrative practices was orchestrated by the “Comité de Préparation pour les questions statutaires” - Preparatory Committee on Staff regulation issues (CPQS). The Committee was entrusted by The Heads of Administrations of the EU Institutions with the task of the Interinstitutional exchange of information and the coordination of solutions for administrative issues newly shown up in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Amongst those, the restrictions imposed to access and use of facilities of the institutions decided by the Institutions in order to preserve their staff’s health, in conformity with the national measures applied in the country where the participants are based. In view of that other organisations of European interest were associated to the workings i.e. European Schools, ECB, EIB, European Patent Office. CPQS convened 90 videoconferencing sessions and set up a shared workspace to make important documentation on the matter available to participants. During the first period (March/April 2020) of the pandemic, a sustained effort to maintain normal performance was invested in the hope to resume normal working conditions as it was expected to see the crisis over sooner than later. Novel issues had to be tackled like the procedures to obtain permits for staff called to be present at the premises, extending network structures to cope with telework, establishing virtual onboarding, support for staff facing personal of family difficulties. The institutions managed to equip all their staff with teleworking solutions within six weeks from the beginning of the confinement and put in place paperless workflows. Market prospections and desperate negotiations in order to obtain security material (masks and disinfectants) occupied a lot of administrative time and resources. Nevertheless, the perseverance of the pandemic forced, at a later stage, a review of policies for longer term remote configurations, inclusion of the members of staff to national vaccination campaigns and the planning of the “new normal”. Gradually, the appearance of new variances called for new approaches for the return of staff to the offices (number of days of recommended/obligatory presence in the office per week, categories of staff exempted from the obligatory presence (vulnerable persons, situations in which critical staff are exempted from this obligation), safety measures to be applied upon such return – e.g. use masks, considerations regarding those situations where staff members openly declare not being vaccinated and vaccinated colleagues do not want to share with them the same office etc.). The effectiveness of the coordination and the resilience proven by the Institutions were the object of the European Court of Auditors report* published on the 1st of September 2022 . It concerned four of the institutions, the European Parliament, the Council, the European Commission and the Court of Justice of the EU. The findings conclude that the EU institutions demonstrated considerable resilience in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, responded rapidly and flexibly, and benefited from previous investments they had made in digitalisation. They adapted their rules of procedure when needed, showed flexibility in adjusting the ways of working to be able to carry out their core activities, and continued fulfilling the roles assigned to them under the Treaties. All of this was achieved while protecting their staff members’ health and well-being, the auditors highlight. It is now expected from the institutions to assess the suitability of new working arrangements and decide on a new model but also to capitalise on the experiences in order to prepare their reaction for the case of future pandemics. *Special report 18/2022, “EU institutions and COVID-19 – Responded rapidly, challenges still ahead to make the best of the crisis-led innovation and flexibility”, is available on the ECA website (eca.europa.eu).

International Organizations Law Review

The International Health Regulations (ihr), of which the World Health Organization is custodian, govern how countries collectively promote global health security, including prevention, detection, and response to potential global health emergencies such as the ongoing covid-19 pandemic. While Article 44 of this binding legal instrument requires countries to collaborate and assist each other in meeting their respective obligations, recent events demonstrate that the precise nature and scope of these legal obligations are ill-understood. A shared understanding of the level and type of collaboration legally required by the ihr is a necessary step in ensuring these obligations can be acted upon and fully realized, and in fostering global solidarity and resilience in the face of future pandemics. In this consensus statement, public international law scholars specializing in global health consider the legal meaning of Article 44 using the interpretive framework of the Vienna Convention on ...

Rome, IAI, April 2020, 5 p. (IAI Commentaries ; 20|23), 2020

The EU is in peril of remaining one of the few international actors still adhering to multilateral principles.In order to concretize the idea of a “geopolitical Union”, the EU needs allies and partners that still invest in rules-based governance regimes. The Commission has identified the African Union as one of the last outspoken promoters of this multilateral agenda. The current threat of COVID-19, and the disorderly response it has provoked within Europe and around the world, suggests that international coordination is the only viable way forward. A revamped Europe–Africa relationship could thus come into fruition at the right time – just as the pandemic’s health-related, economic and political effects continue spreading, requiring urgent and unprecedented responses.