International Law in a Time of Pandemic

To say that this issue of the Journal has been produced under unusual circumstances would be an understatement. When we began work on the issue in March 2020, the seriousness of the ‘coronavirus disease 2019’ (‘covid-19’) outbreak was starting to become clear. Already in January, the Director-General of the World Health Organization (who) had declared the covid-19 outbreak a ‘public health emergency of international concern’ (pheic),1 that is to say, as an ‘extraordinary event’ deemed under the International Health Regulations ‘to constitute a public health risk to other States through the international spread of disease’ and ‘to potentially require a coordinated international response’.2 In March, the Director-General further declared the outbreak a ‘pandemic’.3 The so-called Finagle’s law of dynamic negatives (a somewhat lesser-known derivative of Murphy’s law) postulates that ‘anything that can go wrong, will – at the worst possible moment’. This seems to have held true with respect to the covid-19 outbreak from a global perspective. The pandemic hit during an era of increased scepticism in science, a decline of democracy and a rise of authoritarianism, a flare-up of big-power rivalry, and waning multilateralism. As a consequence, the response to covid-19 became a political plaything both