Designing Compliance Machinery for a New Pandemic Treaty: Lessons from the Paris Agreement?

When designing compliance machinery for a new pandemic treaty - or amendments to the IHR 2005 - it is helpful to consider the facilitative compliance machinery of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change as a model. Part One introduces provides an introduction. Part Two considers the value that an FICM could add to the international law on pandemic preparedness and response. As negotiations for a new pandemic treaty or international legal instrument progress, there are important opportunities to adopt machinery that will help ensure better implementation of pandemic law. Part Three investigates whether aspects of the facilitative compliance and accountability machinery in the Paris Agreement could potentially be transferable. What might States want to replicate from the Paris arrangements? Part Four explains how structural developments in international law infer the need for facilitative compliance machinery. Facilitative compliance may overall be more appropriate and potentially productive as an approach to compliance for problems of global interdependence such as pandemics and climate change. FICMS will work in complement with the occasional exercise of international courts’ and tribunals’ jurisdiction and dispute settlement processes more generally. The chapter’s conclusion iterates that a world in which international law continues to intersect ever more closely with States’ national and domestic regulatory authority calls for greater reliance on FICMs.