Tag: world health organization

scales on blue background.

Conclusion to the Symposium: From Principles to Practice: Human Rights and Public Health Emergencies

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By Timothy Fish Hodgson, Roojin Habibi, and Alicia Ely Yamin

In developing the digital symposium, From Principles to Practice: Human Rights and Public Health Emergencies (which ran from October – December 2023), as editors we endeavored to get scholars, human rights advocates, judges, and policy makers to engage critically with the expert Principles and Guidelines on Human Rights and Public Health Emergencies (the PHE Principles), published by the International Commission of Jurists and the Global Health Law Consortium in May 2023. In doing so, we encouraged contributors to comment on the Principles’ potential usefulness as guidance in addressing real emergency situations, as well as any possible gaps and weaknesses.

While summarizing the entire content of the 13 blogs comprising this symposium in any depth is not possible here, this concluding post will attempt to synthesize some of the major inputs from the contributions. We also provide some of our own observations, as participants in the drafting of the Principles, with the aim of pushing the discussion prompted by the posts forward.

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Climate Change and Neglected Tropical Diseases: Key Takeaways from the WHO-WIPO-WTO Trilateral Symposium

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By Aparajita Lath*

The World Health Organization (WHO), in collaboration with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and the World Trade Organization (WTO), hosted the 10th Trilateral Symposium on Human Health and Climate Change in Geneva this November. This article reflects the significant effort made to put climate-sensitive diseases, many of which are neglected tropical diseases (NTDs), at the forefront of these talks.

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Human Rights Principles in Public Health Emergencies: From the Siracusa Principles to COVID-19 and Beyond

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By Eric A. Friedman and Lawrence O. Gostin

In 1984, the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) adopted the Siracusa Principles, which state that restrictions on human rights must meet standards of legality, necessity, and proportionality. States must use the least restrictive means available when putting in place rights-restricting measures.

One of us (LG) was involved in the drafting of the Siracusa Principles, which have become the chief international instrument governing permissible human rights limitations during national emergencies. Yet when COVID-19 – the greatest health emergency in a century – devastated the world, the Siracusa Principles seemed unequal to the task – too narrow, including with their remit limited to civil and political rights, not sufficiently specific, and above all, without sufficient accountability.

During the pandemic phase of COVID-19, human rights violations were widespread and spanned the full gamut of rights: from arbitrary detentions and suppression of free expression, to violations of the right to health, failure to ensure sufficient food and other necessities during lockdowns, quarantines, and isolations, and woefully inadequate international cooperation and assistance, including discriminatory travel and trade restrictions.

Extensive abuses of human rights during the pandemic led international experts to draft the Principles and Guidelines on Human Rights and Public Health Emergencies (HR Principles). Firmly embedding these principles in international law and creating accountability will be critical for realizing the HR Principles’ potential.

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LOMBARDIA, ITALY - FEBRUARY 26, 2020: Empty hospital field tent for the first AID, a mobile medical unit of red cross for patient with Corona Virus. Camp room for people infected with an epidemic.

Non-State Actors and Public Health Emergencies

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By Rossella De Falco

Strong, well-coordinated and resilient public health care services play a vital role in preventing and responding to public health crises. Under international human rights law, States have a positive, primary obligation to ensure that such health care services are of the highest possible quality and accessible to everyone, everywhere, and without discrimination.

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Making Explicit a Rights-Based Approach to Infodemic in a Public Health Emergency

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By Calvin Wai-Loon Ho

With the mainstreaming of digital technology across many spheres of social life, infodemic management must be an integral part of public health emergency prevention, preparedness, response, and recovery.

While the Principles and Guidelines on Human Rights and Public Health Emergencies (the Principles) do not make explicit reference to infodemics, the application of digital technologies in response to a public health emergency is a clear concern. This article provides further elaboration and critique of the Principles and their treatment of this emergent phenomenon.

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Bill of Health - Globe and vaccine, covid vaccine

COVID-19 Showcased Failed Global Cooperation

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By Kayum Ahmed, Julia Bleckner, and Kyle Knight

In mid-May, the World Health Organization officially declared  the “emergency” phase of the COVID-19 pandemic over. However, the deep wounds of the pandemic remain, compelling  those concerned about this pandemic and  future health emergencies to account for catastrophic failures by those in power. These reflections suggest that the public health crisis could have been addressed differently, both reducing COVID-19’s unprecedented magnitude of illness and death, and preserving human dignity.

The COVID-19 pandemic isn’t over, and the end of this pandemic’s emergency phase certainly doesn’t mean we accept the widely abysmal response as the model for the world’s reaction to the next one. Public health emergencies aren’t entirely preventable. We live in a complex world where health is increasingly affected by a changing climate, extraordinary levels of pollution, and inadequate preventive and responsive health services. Emergencies will happen. But when they do, responses that uphold human rights need to be the norm.

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Introduction to the Symposium: From Principles to Practice: Human Rights and Public Health Emergencies

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By Roojin Habibi, Timothy Fish Hodgson, and Alicia Ely Yamin

Today, as the world transitions from living in the grips of a novel coronavirus to living with an entrenched, widespread infectious disease known as COVID-19, global appreciation for the human rights implications of public health crises are once again rapidly fading from view.

Against the backdrop of this burgeoning collective amnesia, a project to articulate the human rights norms relevant to public health emergencies led to the development of the 2023 Principles and Guidelines on Human Rights and Public Health Emergencies (the Principles).

This symposium gathers reflections from leading scholars, activists, jurists, and others from around the world with respect to the recently issued Principles.

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The COVID-19 Pandemic, the Failure of the Binary PHEIC Declaration System, and the Need for Reform

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This post was originally published on the Verfassungsblog as part of our joint symposium on international pandemic lawmaking.

By Ilja Richard Pavone

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 legal and institutional regime aimed at preventing and controlling the spread of infectious diseases, grounded on the International Health Regulations (IHR) was heavily criticized.

The alarm mechanism based on the declaration of Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC), in particular, has been severely tested. A PHEIC is an extraordinary event that constitutes a potential public health risk through the international spread of a disease outbreak. The WHO Director-General bases his decision to “ring the bell” upon the technical advice of an Emergency Committee (EC) carrying out “an assessment of the risk to human health, of the risk of international spread, and of the risk of interference with international traffic.”

A PHEIC, then, is declared only when an event is already sufficiently acute and has started to spread internationally. It is not an early warning, but a formal alert, and in the case of COVID-19 it was issued with extreme delay only on 30 January 2020, (one month after notification of early cases by the Chinese government), after Beijing had already adopted quarantine measures around the city of Wuhan, and draconian measures to curb the spread of the disease in the country had been announced.

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The Mexican-American border, with some construction still ongoing on the American side.

Pandemics without Borders? Reconsidering Territoriality in Pandemic Preparedness and Response Instruments

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This post was originally published on the Verfassungsblog as part of our joint symposium on international pandemic lawmaking.

By Raphael Oidtmann

The COVID-19 pandemic has (yet again) disclosed that, in contemporary international law, the notion of borders resembles a distinct emanation of legal fiction, i.e., “something assumed in law to be fact irrespective of the truth or accuracy of that assumption.” This characterization of international borders holds particularly true with a view towards managing, containing, and countering the spread of highly contagious pathogens: especially in the context of responding to the global COVID-19 pandemic, it has hence become apparent that the traditional conception of borders as physical frontiers has been rendered somewhat moot. On the contrary, the pandemic experience has proven that a more flexible, fluid, and functional understanding of (international) borders might be warranted, also with a view towards (re-)conceptualizing international health law.

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Geneva, Switzerland - December 03, 2019: World Health Organization (WHO / OMS).

Towards Member-driven International Pandemic Lawmaking

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This post was originally published on the Verfassungsblog as part of our joint symposium on international pandemic lawmaking.

By Ching-Fu Lin and Chuan-Feng Wu

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. Commentators have examined the IHR’s decades of struggle in fulfilling its objectives to control cross-border pandemics such as COVID-19, pointing out problems over the level of obligation, precision of language, delegation of power, settlement of dispute, and lack of enforcement power, among others. What has been overlooked, however, is the crucial question of whether the institutional design of the IHR enables the WHO and its Member States to deliver good global pandemic governance.

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. For example, the IHR failed to facilitate the timely declaration of a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) due to the DG’s and the Emergency Committee’s misinterpretation and misapplication of rules allegedly driven by political considerations. On 23 January 2020, even when COVID-19 cases had already been found outside of China, thereby indicating the risk of cross-border transmission (IHR Article 12(4)(e)), the second meeting of the Emergency Committee decided to confine the definition of “international spread” to “having actual local spread of COVID-19 in a country beyond China,” instead of “having the potential for, or a risk of, cross-border transmission,” and refused to declare a PHEIC. The WHO is also criticized for abusing its bureaucratic influences to further the agendas of individual Member States like China, letting politics override science.

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