Article by Rana Moustafa Essawy. EJIL:Talk! Blog of the European Journal of International Law.
June 15, 2020.
On May 18, President Trump tweeted a 4-page letter addressed to the WHO, threatening to cut funding to the organisation and reconsider the United States’ membership within it. One of the reasons for these threats was the WHO’s reaction to China’s alleged human rights violations. President Trump accused the WHO of ‘being conspicuously silent [ with ] respect to the closure of Dr Zhang’s lab’ after having notified the Chinese authorities about sequencing the genome of the virus. The president also criticised the WHO for not commenting on China’s ‘discriminatory treatment of Africans related to the pandemic in Guangzhou and other cities in China’.
These accusations raise the following question: Does the WHO have the power under the International Health Regulations (IHR) to review states’ compliance with human rights obligations in the context of a pandemic response? The WHO Director General has indeed issued his general remarks on the importance of respecting human rights amid the COVID-19 response, but can the WHO do more by monitoring states individually?
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