The novel coronavirus pandemic is currently raging throughout the world, raising core questions about international law: What are the relevant obligations, powers and procedures under public international law? Have they been complied with? What role, if any, has international law, via its institutions, played so far? This talk by Pedro A. Villarreal will draw from several regimes of international law, including human rights law, trade law, law of development finance and peace and security law to evaluate these questions in light of the current global health crisis.
Pedro A. Villarreal is a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg, Germany, where he is also a co-manager of the project “International Health Governance.” He has a PhD in Law from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), where he received the prize for the best doctoral dissertation in Law and Social Sciences in 2017, with the topic “Pandemics and Law: A Global Governance Perspective” (available in Spanish).