This essay is part of an ongoing dialogue on INTERPOL’s role in international law and global governance. It argues that INTERPOL’s 2025 General Agreement on the Privileges and Immunities of the ICPO-INTERPOL (General Agreement)1 reflects a remarkable development in the multilateral recognition of international organizations.

Whatever may have been thought in the past, including within the United Nations (UN), there is now no reason to doubt the status of the International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL) as an international organization.1 That is important for many reasons, including its status under international and national law, which is fundamental for its dealings with states and other international organizations, not least the UN, and for immunities and other international privileges.

The decentralized international legal order arguably creates structural incentives for states to utilize INTERPOL—an entity of virtually universal membership—to reduce gaps in transnational police cooperation. One of INTERPOL’s iconic actions is the release of a Red Notice. It is the publication of decentralized requests by a member country or approved international entities such as the International Criminal Court (ICC),1 asking police worldwide to locate and, if applicable domestic law and treaties permit, provisionally arrest wanted persons or restrict their movement, pending extradition or surrender.2 Although INTERPOL does not have legal authority to oblige members to arrest persons in question, a Red Notice regularly leads to border stops or arrest pending extradition, travel or visa denials, and knock-on effects such as banking and employment difficulties. The fragmented international legal order may have paradoxically generated structural incentives to support a level of centrality represented by INTERPOL.

INTERPOL is recognized as an international organization with legal personality, a permanent structure, and independent decision-making authority. Its operational core lies in facilitating international police cooperation, primarily through the exchange and processing of data related to criminal matters. The present essay develops a working concept of shared responsibility in this particular context.

Over centuries and across continents, authoritarian governments have demonstrated a large appetite for international cooperation to target political opponents across borders. In 1851, the “first modern police organization”—the Police Union of German States, whose members included Austria and Prussia—was established “with the express purpose of policing the political opposition of established autocratic regimes.”1 During the 1970s and early 1980s, military regimes in South America participated in a secret scheme known as Operation Condor to coordinate their efforts to suppress subversion.2 A recent analysis of twenty-nine “hard authoritarian” regional organizations found that twenty-five were engaged in police cooperation.3 The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) is an example. Its member states have agreed to jointly fight the “three evils” of terrorism, separatism, and extremism.4 Following a 2009 demonstration that led to riots in Urumqi, Xinjiang, some organizers fled abroad; at China’s behest, SCO members Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan detained and then extradited them back to China.5

Out of the many fascinating issues concerning the International Criminal Police Organization—INTERPOL (INTERPOL), I would like to concentrate on three main themes and topics. The first one has to do with the status of INTERPOL and the potential impact of a multilateral privileges and immunities treaty on such status. The second concerns the challenges arising from the case of Waite and Kennedy v. Germany1 (Waite and Kennedy), and whatever followed in the “shadow of Waite and Kennedy,”2 not only for INTERPOL, but for international organizations more generally. The third theme addresses the responses to Waite and Kennedy, and particularly the availability of suitable alternative dispute settlement mechanisms—an issue that is currently discussed in the International Law Commission.3

The health crisis of COVID-19 has provoked a pivotal moment of global health law reform that comes against larger shifts against international law, democracy, and human rights. In this light, it is perhaps not surprising that state-led amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR)—international law’s primary instrument governing state responses to public health crises—and a prospective Pandemic Agreement—designed to remedy the former’s defects—have shifted away from the language of human rights and toward the sweeping principle of equity. While these changes appear to herald an important normative and legal shift in international law, they also raise longer-standing questions about coherence and fragmentation in international law, and about the future of human rights within international law. In this essay, I first explore larger concerns around coherence and fragmentation in international law, and the practical manifestation of these threats in disparities in access to COVID-19 vaccines. Second, I consider the legal and political implications of the shift to equity in both instruments. I conclude by considering what this move may mean for coherence and human rights in international law.

The entry into force of the amendments to the International Health Regulations 2005 (IHR 2005), on September 19, 2025, represents a pivotal moment in global health emergency governance history.1 The COVID-19 crisis revealed the inability of both developed and developing nations to protect their populations from the pandemic. Developing nations experienced disproportionate impacts due to insufficient financial resources and manufacturing capacity to obtain necessary health products for pandemic response.2 The neoliberal emphasis on economic efficiency and enforced trade liberalization through the World Trade Organization (WTO) framework, particularly mandatory product patent protection under the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) widened inequities in access to vaccines, therapeutics and diagnostics (VTDs), and increased dependency of developing countries on developed countries for this access.3

COVID-19 starkly exposed the systemic frailties of global health governance, particularly concerning the functioning and utility of the International Health Regulations (IHR). Multiple independent reviews declared that the existing framework was designed to constrain rapid global action, and recommended concrete transformational reforms for the global health legal regime.1 Most notably they recommended the negotiation of a new instrument to govern future pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response (PPPR). The appetite for a new instrument was cemented by a statement of support from twenty-six other world leaders and the director-general of World Health Organization (WHO).2 From the start, there was a lack of clear unified vision for what a new treaty ought to achieve. This ideological rift generally fell along the North–South divide, something that continued throughout the negotiations of the treaty. Low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), suffering from the stark inequalities in vaccine access during the COVID-19 pandemic demanded embedding equitable distribution of life-saving health products into legally binding commitments. Meanwhile high-income countries (HICs) sought greater prevention and surveillance activities, determined to prevent spillover events from occurring and spreading in the first place.

For Global South countries who faced vaccine inequity during the COVID-19 pandemic, the development of an equitable Pathogen Access and Benefit Sharing (PABS) system is considered to be “at the heart of the political bargain”1 of a pandemic agreement, and is critically important to prevent a repetition of vaccine inequity in future pandemics. These countries want to ensure that they have equitable access to pandemic products developed using genetic sequence data (GSD) or digital sequence information (DSI) from their geographies. A repeat of pandemic history, where GSD was uploaded from the Global South (such as from China, and from Botswana in the case of the Omicron variant), with Global South countries receiving a lower proportion of vaccine supply, would be abhorrent.

The current trend of growing state disengagement from global governance institutions—seen as a threat to the World Health Organization—is not unfamiliar to the World Trade Organization (WTO). Over the past two decades, multilateral trade negotiation channels have increasingly given way to more selective partnerships, built around preferential alliances and strategic markets outside established global platforms. These alliances have taken shape through Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs)—treaties negotiated outside the WTO umbrella between two or more countries that facilitate trade and economic integration between them.1 Between 2015 and 2022, the number of RTAs in force rose from 290 to 385, both through major blocs—already formalized in large-scale regional trade integration, such as the European Union—and through bilateral arrangements between individual states or regional markets.2 Examples include, among others, the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, recently expanded to twelve countries with the accession of the UK, and the new UK-India free trade agreement.

On August 14, 2024, the upsurge of mpox across more than a dozen African countries was declared a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC).1 As is often the case, the World Health Organization’s (WHO) director-general made this determination on the basis of advice tendered by an expert committee convened under the International Health Regulations (IHR)—the world’s only international agreement on public health emergency prevention, preparedness, and response.2 The timing of this declaration, however, differed in one crucial respect from past PHEIC declarations: just one day earlier, the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) had issued its own regional alert, designating the outbreak a “Public Health Emergency of Continental Security” (PHECS).3

In the field of “global health,”1 a sense of discomfort with the status quo and the systems and practices it upholds persists.2 This unease stems from the lopsided nature of power and resources to address health issues across the world.3 The authors accept the view that a system is what it reproduces, regardless of its best intentions.4 The concentration of disease and death amongst those with the least power to address them reflects clearly established causal links between inequitable systems and health outcomes,5 which have precipitated agitations for rectification of global health injustice. This has culminated in the clamor to “decolonize” global health,6 which has ranged from interrogations of the training practices of global health students and practitioners,7 to recommendations of better practices within the field,8 decentralization of power, and challenge to assumptions of expertise in the sites of practice and intervention.9 Given that power is largely a function of means, some have made suggestions to fundamentally address how the flow of resources shape the global health agenda, while prioritizing certain voices over others.10

Civil registration and vital statistics (CRVS) systems comprise two interdependent components: civil registration (CR) and vital statistics (VS). Civil registration records the occurrence and characteristics of vital events in a population, including births, deaths, fetal deaths, and cause of death information.1 Vital statistics compile and process the data derived from civil registration to analyze mortality trends, and track demographic patterns, such as birth and death rates.2

Global health law as a field has been deeply unequal, reflecting colonial histories, geopolitics, and power plays. The current turmoil and fundamental shifts occurring in international politics has uncertain outcomes for global public health. Looking at the field from the prism of recent and ongoing global health negotiations serves to illustrate the unpredictability of the direction the governance of global health can take. Recent global health law reforms in the aftermath of COVID-19 have aimed to create obligations governing health emergencies. While much of the discussions have unfolded in the realm of health emergencies, many of the resulting legal obligations will have a normative impact on the field. Some of these new obligations are considerably caveated and weakened compared to what was originally articulated by some member states of the World Health Organization (WHO).

Since the 1960s, Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) scholars1 have argued that decolonization requires more than formal sovereignty; it demands equal participation by low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), particularly post-colonial states, in meaningfully shaping the rules of international order. The global health governance system, however, was largely constructed within a post-World War II order and, thus, reproduced rather than dismantled imperial hierarchies. Power and agenda-setting authority remained concentrated in former colonial states, Western hegemonic powers, and newly created international institutions that entrenched asymmetrical decision making. Over the past eight decades, global health governance has thus been disproportionately shaped by Global North actors, limiting the ability of many states to exercise meaningful agency and influence. The result has been a persistent erosion of principles of equitable global health and international law, including a core principle of participation, rooted not in the absence of legal recognition but in the centralized allocation of authority within global health institutions and organizations.2

Human rights have served as a central normative framework for global health law, with the World Health Organization (WHO) providing an institutional foundation to implement human rights law through global health governance. In implementing human rights obligations, WHO has sought to bring human rights into its normative standard-setting to promote health equity—within and between countries. Yet, WHO faced challenges in realizing human rights to ensure equity in the COVID-19 response, as its member states violated individual rights and undermined global solidarity. Despite this imperative to strengthen human rights as a foundation for global health equity, recent reforms have failed to advance human rights meaningfully in global health law, as WHO member states weakened necessary human rights provisions. This essay examines new opportunities to strengthen human rights in global health, ensuring systemic integration across international legal regimes and human rights operationalization in the implementation of global health law.

There is a paradox at the heart of the emerging field of Global Health Law (GHL), which lies in the relationship between GHL and governance for global health (GHG). The field of GHL has garnered increasing interest since the COVID-19 pandemic, the revisions of the International Health Regulations of 2005 in 2024 (IHR),1 and the adoption of a Pandemic Agreement by the World Health Assembly in 2025.2 The editors of the recently launched Journal of Global Health Law aptly assert, “global health law is fragmented without a coherent body of standards. It includes legally binding and non-binding instruments adopted under the framework of the WHO and other relevant international institutions/organizations … and a range of hard and soft law standards recognized in other branches of international law.”3 GHG is defined here as: “the formal and informal structures, systems, and institutions through which actors: i) make decisions about global health standards, policies, and priorities; ii) finance, organize, and implement global health initiatives, programs, and plans; and iii) influence and engage with actors, systems, or institutions that lie outside the health sector but impact health.”4 Thus, the newly revised IHR—like the Pandemic Treaty when in effect—empowers the WHO to declare pandemic emergencies as well as Public Health Emergencies of International Concern (PHEIC),5 which then trigger actions and reporting requirements on the part of national governments. In this example, the legal agreements themselves are GHL and the worldwide administration they call for are governance arrangements, which are noticeably lacking in accountability for global institutions and private actors.6