Global Health Law and Communicable Diseases

In one line

Global health law is the body of international law bearing on the health of populations, and in binding form it consists of the International Health Regulations and two conventions adopted under article 19 of the WHO Constitution: tobacco control in 2003 and the Pandemic Agreement in 2025.

What global health law is

The field is defined by its subject, not by a single instrument. Global health law is the international law that bears on the health of populations, and it is assembled from several bodies of law that were not written together.

The WHO Constitution and what the Health Assembly makes under it, that is conventions under article 19, regulations under article 21, and recommendations under article 23, worked in [The World Health Organization].

The human rights treaties, chiefly the right to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health, which the WHO Preamble stated in 1946 and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights made a treaty obligation.

Trade law, because access to medicines turns on patents, and patents on the agreement worked in [TRIPS], while quarantine and import restrictions engage the general exceptions in [General Principles of International Trade Law].

Environmental law, because the prevention obligation and the due diligence standard in [UNDP and UNEP] apply to health harms crossing frontiers as they apply to any other.

The law of treaties and of responsibility run under all of it, as everywhere in this book.

Why the field exists as a field. Disease does not respect frontiers, and the Preamble to the WHO Constitution says exactly why that produces an obligation rather than a mere shared interest: unequal development in different countries in the promotion of health and control of disease, especially communicable disease, is a common danger, and the health of all peoples is fundamental to the attainment of peace and security. A State's failure to control an epidemic at home is a harm to its neighbours, and the structure of the problem is the structure the environmental prevention obligation addresses.

Communicable disease: the legal problem

The problem is not medical, it is one of incentives, and international law exists here to correct it.

A State that reports an outbreak is punished for reporting it. Trade stops, travel stops, tourism collapses, and the neighbouring States close borders. A State that conceals an outbreak avoids all of that, at least for a while. So the incentive is to conceal, and the law's task is to make reporting the rational course.

The two devices the law uses. An obligation to notify, with a time limit, which is the notification duty in [The International Health Regulations]. And a discipline on what other States may do in response, so that the reporting State does not lose more by reporting than by concealing.