Research pick: Building a Pandemic Convention - "The role of international law in controlling disease outbreaks"

How can international law be used to control the spread of emergent diseases that lead to mass outbreaks and global pandemics, such as the coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2 that has plunged the world into the COVID-19 pandemic? That question is addressed by research published in the International Journal of Public Law and Policy.

Rajat Banerjee of the School of Law and Justice at Adamas University in Kolkata, West Bengal and Abhinav Kumar of the School of Law at GD Goenka University in Haryana, India, explain that epidemics and pandemics destabilise existing global health infrastructure and present nation-states with an alarming set of circumstances in which they must attempt to protect their citizens and maintain, the rule of law, economic stability, and infrastructure.

The team suggests that international law may well have a role to play in providing legal safeguards that address many of the issues that arise when a new disease emerges. It can do so by punishing those at the nation-state and citizen level who are to blame if they are found to be directly and substantially responsible for such outbreaks, for instance. Such a deterrent could substantially lower the risk of a newly emerged pathogen emerging into the world arena if those who allow it to happen through negligence or ignorance know that they might be punished for their actions or inaction. An analysis of the current literature in the realm of international law leads the authors to the conclusion that a “one-size-fits-all” is needed for this legal approach at the international legal.

A Pandemic Convention is needed, the team writes. All nation-states would be obliged to adhere to its rules and laws so that the failures of nation-states and citizens we have seen in facing past disease outbreaks would not be repeated and we might prevent the next emergent pathogen from wreaking a global pandemic that might be even worse than the current coronavirus pandemic in which the world is currently entangled.

Banerjee, R. and Kumar, A. (2021) ‘The role of international law in controlling disease outbreaks’, Int. J. Public Law and Policy, Vol. 7, No. 1, pp.74–96.