The Seventy-seventh World Health Assembly (‘WHA-77’) was held in Geneva, Switzerland, on 27 May – 1 June 2024. The theme of WHA-77 has been ‘All for Health, Health for All’, with two main hot topics on the agenda: (1) the revision of the International Health Regulations (IHR) from their 2005 version, based on more than 300 proposals submitted by the WHO Member States and (2) the adoption of the long-awaited International Treaty on Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response (‘Pandemic Treaty’) on the basis of the ‘Proposal for the WHO Pandemic Agreement’ from 22 April 2024. These crucial developments derived from the need to address gaps in the global health governance indicated by the COVID-19 pandemic, such as the insufficient focus of IHR-2005 on the pandemics’ prevention, lack of effective control tools over IHR-2005 enforcement, and the missing provisions on access to medicines, which defined the course of the negotiation process. The WHO’s work in these two directions took place simultaneously through the Intergovernmental Negotiating Body (INB)…
Treaty Negotiations
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Should Ecocide be an International Crime? It’s Time for States to Decide
It’s not like international criminal justice has had an easy summer. Now it has a new bone to chew on – and it’s a particularly meaty one. On Monday, 9 September 2024, Vanuatu, Fiji and Samoa jointly submitted a proposal to amend the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court to the UN Secretary-General…
Entry into Force of the Nile Basin Cooperative Framework Agreement: Challenges and Prospects
On July 8, 2024, South Sudan announced that its Transitional National Legislative Assembly (TNLA) unanimously ratified the Nile Basin Cooperative Framework Agreement (CFA). (See here) This development follows ratifications by five Nile Basin States — Ethiopia, Tanzania, Rwanda, Uganda, and Burundi— paving the way for the CFA to come into force sixty…
Compliance and Accountability Mechanisms in the 2024 Revisions to the WHO International Health Regulations (2005)
Since the COVID-19 virus first emerged in China in late 2019 there have been many high-level reviews of how the world could better have tackled this devastating episode, including the report of the Independent Panel on Pandemic Preparedness and Response (IPPR) report “Make it the Last Pandemic” co-chaired by Helen Clark and Ellen…
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