Given its cross-border nature and the threat to global health, the COVID-19 crisis has shown the world the importance of strengthening global pandemic governance. In particular, the pandemic has prominently indicated significant flaws in the WHO’s International Health Regulations (IHR, 2005) as the current instrument governing pandemics. In addition to recognizing that revisions are urgently needed to the IHR (2005), a call to adopt a new international legal instrument that specifically governs pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response began at the end of 2020. Spearheaded by Charles Michel, President of the European Council, the pandemic treaty idea gathered support from a group of world leaders upon which the 74th World Health Assembly (WHA) of May 2021 adopted a decision to consider the benefits of developing a new international treaty on pandemics at a special session starting on 29 November 2021. In this second-ever special session of its kind in the WHA’s history, an Intergovernmental Negotiating Body (INB) was established by WHO Member States to draft and negotiate a pandemic treaty, and…
WTO
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Does It Matter Who Writes Legal Rulings? It Depends.
Does it matter whether rulings delivered by international tribunals are truly written by the adjudicators appointed to the case, as opposed to the permanent staff of a legal bureaucracy working in the background? In his Reply to our EJIL article, ‘WTO Rulings and the Veil of Anonymity’, Armin Steinbach claims there is nothing untoward about unnamed…
The WTO Secretariat’s ‘Open Secret’: Unpacking the Controversy
Over the past two years, we have had the opportunity to present the findings from our EJIL article, ‘WTO Rulings and the Veil of Anonymity’, to a number of audiences spanning fields from international law to political science and quantitative methods. Though the article makes a number of claims about transparency in judicial settings, the design of…
Ukraine v Russia: A “Reverse Compliance” case on Genocide
Disputes before international courts and tribunals typically arise out of an allegation by one State that another State has violated international law. The State making the allegation takes the initiative to bring the dispute before an adjudicator. The new dispute initiated by Ukraine against Russia is novel in this respect, since Ukraine invokes the International Court of…
The EU’s Anti-Coercion Instrument: A Big Stick for Big targets
Applying economic pressure to coerce another country into a particular course of action has been around for a while, as developing countries can attest. In recent years, though, economic coercion has also been increasingly used against developed countries. The EU has been the target of such unwelcome pressure from, among others, China, Russia and the United States.