WHO, Global Health law Consortium Communicable Diseases, and the International Health Regulations

In early 2020 a virus that first surfaced in one city shut the Mumbai local trains, emptied Marine Drive and closed your college within weeks. No single country could have stopped it alone, and no single country's law could have told the others what to do. Who, then, speaks for the world when a disease crosses every border, and what legal force do their words carry? This topic explains the World Health Organization, the wider web of global health law around it, and the International Health Regulations that sit at its centre.

In two minutes

Global health law is the body of treaties, binding regulations and soft-law guidance through which states, led by the World Health Organization, cooperate to prevent and control the cross-border spread of disease, while each state keeps primary responsibility for its own public health.

The rest of this chapter

The full explanation, the cheat sheet, every previous-year question at every mark weight, the quiz and the answer skeletons are part of Public International Law on LexBlox Semester. Sign in to unlock the subject, or read Module 1 of Legal Language and Writing free.