Recorded on October 28, 2020.

COVID’s Challenge to the WHO Regime

Event Description:

This is the first talk in our three-part series, COVID and Constitutions, which explores how the current pandemic challenges national and international legal orderings.  This week, Professor Alvarez argues that COVID-19 has both validated the premises of the World Health Organization’s constitution and demonstrated the global health regime’s abject failure. Like other U.N. specialized agencies, the WHO relies on its technocratic legitimacy and states’ self-interest to secure compliance with their obligations; it is underfunded and overly deferential to its most powerful members. COVID should be the catalyst for overdue reforms – but neither the world’s leading power, the United States, nor its challenger, China, is willing to empower the WHO to intrude more forcefully into states’ domestic affairs, as it must to protect global public health. Shitong Qiao will respond to Professor Alvarez’s critique from China’s perspective.  

Read Professor Alvarez’s working paper: “The WHO in the Age of Coronavirus”

About the Speakers:

José E. Alvarez is the Herbert and Rose Rubin Professor of International Law at New York University School of Law, and faculty director of the U.S.-Asia Law Institute. He is also a former president of the American Society of International Law, the previous co-editor-in-chief of the American Journal of International Law, and a member of the Institut de Droit International and Council on Foreign Relations. 

Shitong Qiao is an associate professor at the University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law. In the 2020-2021 academic year, he also is the law and public affairs fellow at Princeton University, working on his second monograph related to property, community and democracy in urban China. Dr. Qiao was the inaugural Jerome A. Cohen visiting professor of law at NYU in Spring 2020. He is an expert on property and urban law with a focus on comparative law and China.