The COVID-19 pandemic served as a catalyst to build a stronger European Health Union to protect the health of Europeans and to develop a new Global Health Strategy to contribute to global health security. In positioning itself as a key player in global health governance, the EU seeks to assert its responsibility as a global health actor and deepen its leadership in global health law.

Following from sweeping law reforms across the global health landscape, there is a need to prepare the next generation to advance global health law to ensure justice for a healthier world. Educational programs across disciplines have increasingly incorporated the field of global health law, with new courses examining the law and policy frameworks that apply to the new set of public health threats, non-state actors, and regulatory instruments that structure global health. Such interdisciplinary training must be expanded throughout the world to prepare future practitioners to strengthen global health law — ensuring a foundation for global health in legal studies and law and global health studies. Meeting this imperative for global health law teaching — establishing academic courses and textbooks on global legal responses to shared health threats — will be necessary to support students to address the global health challenges of the future.

The United Nations (UN) General Assembly High-Level Meeting (HLM) on pandemic prevention, preparedness and response (PPPR) was a missed opportunity to bring high-level commitment and momentum to the global governance of health emergencies. Intended to bring much-needed attention to a policy issue that is rapidly slipping down the international agenda, the fraught diplomacy among member states, lack of consensus on key issues, and weak UN Political Declaration in New York foreshadow a difficult road ahead for upcoming negotiations under the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva. This column chronicles the evolving engagement of the UN in global health governance, examines the diplomatic process leading to the UN HLM on PPPR, and assesses the contributions and missed opportunities of its resulting Political Declaration.

During the COVID-19 pandemic the international community repeatedly called for the equitable distribution of vaccines and other medical countermeasures. However, there was a substantial gap between this rhetoric and State action. High-income countries secured significantly more doses than they required, leaving many low-income countries unable to vaccinate their populations. Current negotiations for the new Pandemic Treaty under the World Health Organization (WHO) attempt to narrow the gap between rhetoric and behaviour by building the concept of equity into the Treaty's substantive content. However, equity is difficult to define, much less to operationalize. Presently, WHO Member States appear to have chosen ‘access and benefit-sharing’ (ABS) as the predominant mechanism for operationalizing equity in the Treaty. This article examines ABS as a mechanism, its use in public health, and argues that ABS is fundamentally flawed, unable to achieve equity. It proposes other options for an equitable international response to future pandemic threats.

The health of the planet and its life forms are under threat from anthropogenic climate change, pollution and biodiversity loss, and the extreme weather events, heatwaves and wildfires that accompany them. The burgeoning field of planetary health studies the interplay between humanity and the Earth's biosphere and ecosystems on which human health depends. Scholarship on law from a planetary health vantage point remains scarce. This article fills this gap by delineating the conceptual building blocks of a planetary health law, which, in its latent form, is dispersed across various hard and soft sources of international environmental law and global health law that converge on the right to a healthy environment, and, to a lesser extent, rights of nature emerging in various domestic jurisdictions. It elucidates how the fragmented regimes of international environmental and global health law could be developed in more coherent ways, driven by an overarching concern for the integrity of the planetary foundations of life.

Governments can practically and efficiently address zoonoses and AMR –– within the text of the new pandemic instrument. We map the overlaps between the efforts needed to address both pandemic threats, including (a) equitable access to medical countermeasures, (b) globally integrated One Health surveillance and monitoring systems, (c) increased technical and laboratory capacity in low- and middle-income countries, and (d) a regulatory framework governing the stewardship of antimicrobials. By outlining potential dual-purpose provisions that could be included in a pandemic instrument, we argue that addressing AMR in the pandemic instrument is practicable, the most effective use of limited time and resources, and provides the best opportunity for future global pandemic readiness.

In the wake of COVID-19, the World Health Organization established an Intergovernmental Negotiating Body to negotiate a new instrument for pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response. This special issue of the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics brings together multidisciplinary scholarship to address the question of whether antimicrobial resistance should be included in this new instrument. Drawing from disciplines including law, anthropology, history, public health, public policy, economics, and veterinary medicine, this special issue explores the inclusion of AMR within the Pandemic Instrument from three perspectives: first, through the lens of global AMR governance, second, from the perspective of technical governance challenges and opportunities affecting the global ability to address AMR and future pandemics, and third, from the perspective of pandemic instrument mechanisms for strengthening global AMR governance. Each paper makes a concrete recommendation with respect to the importance of including AMR within the scope of the pandemic instrument.

Despite recognition of the health threat posed at the human-animal-environment interface long ago, One Health has yet to be meaningfully integrated into global pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response. With the negotiation of the forthcoming pandemic instrument under the auspices of the World Health Organization (WHO) — which is inherently restricted by its own constitutional mandate of human health — One Health risks being sidelined once again. Genuine integration of a One Health approach into this treaty will require the institutionalization of formal One Health coordination mechanisms.

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is one of the defining global health threats of our time, but no international legal instrument currently offers the framework and mechanisms needed to address it. Fortunately, the actions needed to address AMR have considerable overlap with the actions needed to confront other pandemic threats.

Recognizing marked limitations of global health law in the COVID-19 pandemic, a rising number of states are supporting the development of a new pandemic treaty. This prospective treaty has the potential to clarify state obligations for pandemic preparedness and response and strengthen World Health Organization authorities to promote global health security. Examining the essential scope and content of a pandemic treaty, this column analyzes the policymaking processes and substantive authorities necessary to meet this historic moment.

This paper brings a constitutional economics perspective to bear on the World Health Organization (WHO), the flagship United Nations intergovernmental health organisation, which is obligated by its Constitution to achieve ‘the highest possible level of health’ for the world's peoples. The WHO has in the seven decades of its existence used its formidable legislative powers only sparingly. It has been widely chided for being weak in regional coordination and unresponsive to transnational emergencies like the West African Ebola outbreak of 2014–2016. In 2020, it found itself at the centre of the COVID-19 pandemic and in the middle of the Sino-American geopolitical tug-of-war. This paper traces the discordance between the Constitution's stated purposes and the actual track record of the WHO not back to its organisational culture nor to weak leadership but to the design of the Constitution itself. It analytically distinguishes the Constitution's expressive from its instrumental halves, and shows that, whilst the former embodies a ‘constitutional moment’ of international health solidarity right after the Second World War, the latter embodies a reserved and limited delegation from member-states that are jealous of their sovereignty.