The question of an international convention on pandemics was recently raised in the pages of this journal. Today, it is the urgency of the negotiation that is worrying.
Indeed, by its decision SSA2/5, dated 1er December 2021, the World Health Assembly (WHA) established an intergovernmental body to draft and negotiate a convention or other international instrument on pandemics. Not without reason, the Director General of the WHO considered this decision “historic”, because it would offer “a unique opportunity to strengthen the global health architecture in order to protect and promote the well-being of all”.
While this important decision is certainly to be welcomed, we can only deplore the surprising slowness of the process envisaged to implement it.
However, this decision was taken during one of the very rare extraordinary sessions of the AMS, which was specially convened for this purpose from 29 November to 1er December 2021, with all the speed that a rapid reaction to the devastating consequences of COVID-19 demands. Paradoxically, however, the timetable for the work of the negotiating body is frustratingly slow. It provides that: (i) the first meeting of the body will be held in March 2022 and will aim to set its structure and program; (ii) the second meeting will take place in August 2022 and will be used to determine the provision of the constitution of the World Health Organization (WHO) under which the instrument should be adopted; (iii) the intergovernmental body will then make a progress report to the 76and AMS, i.e. in May 2023; (iv) the body will submit its findings to the 77and AMS, that is to say not before May 2024!
Is there a health emergency related to the pandemic or not? Taking almost three years to write an emergency agreement seems to me to be disconnected from health reality.
A tight deadline
A resolutely more diligent stance is needed in the face of the global resurgence of the pandemic crisis. A tighter timeline is still conceivable if WHO member states want it. To this end, a new extraordinary session of the AMS could be convened in December 2022. Its sole purpose would be the examination and adoption of the draft convention on pandemics, which would have been previously drawn up and negotiated by the care of the intergovernmental body.
With this in mind, Member States could redefine the terms of decision SSA2/5: (i) first during the next session of the WHO Executive Board (24-29 January 2022), whose agenda day includes an item on public health emergencies, conducive to a discussion on the “rescheduling” of meetings and activities of the negotiating body; (ii) then during the 75and AMS (May 22 to 28, 2022), which could come to endorse the revised schedule of meetings of the body and confirm the will of the Member States to hold an extraordinary session of the AMS in December 2022.
The schedule thus condensed would be coupled with an intensification of the meetings of the negotiating body, which would make it possible to conclude the agreement before the end of 2022. This is not utopian. This is evidenced by the sustained mobilization of the Working Group on Strengthening WHO’s Preparedness and Response to Health Emergencies, which carried out all its tasks and held five close meetings, in five months, i.e. between mid-July and mid-November 2021, after which he delivered his report assessing the benefits of a convention or similar instrument on pandemics. And we can add the work of the International Center for Comparative Environmental Law and the Institute of International Law, which have prepared proposals for an international convention on pandemics likely to fuel the discussions of the negotiators of the Member States of the WHO.
In a comparable context of a serious disaster with cross-border effects, that of the explosion of a reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power station on 26 April 1986, two conventions had been negotiated and adopted in just five months to the day within the International Atomic Energy Agency, despite the tense geopolitical context of the time: the Convention on Early Notification of a Nuclear Accident and the Convention on Assistance in the Case of a Nuclear Accident or Radiological Emergency .
Canada’s role
Why couldn’t the diplomatic prowess of 1986 be repeated today, at the WHO, in the presence of a pandemic that has already killed more than five million human beings throughout the world?
We believe that Canada, as a member state of the WHO, should use all of its diplomatic and political weight to urge the states of the international community, and in particular the members of the WHO Executive Board, who will meet from 24 to 29 January next, to speed up and seriously shorten the time for negotiation of an international treaty, the importance and relevance of which are growing day by day.