Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
It follows, then, that because member states failed to raise any specific objections
to the Surat advisory at the time in 1994, they tacitly signalled their endorsement of
this type of measure, laying the foundation for the 2003 SarS advisories. Indeed, the
wHo legal department appears to have adhered to this line of reasoning. In extending
this principle even further, the fact that no member state sought to challenge the legal
status of the wHo's actions throughout the 2003 pandemic negates the possibility
that the organisation's actions could be classified as
ultra vires
. Instead, by not
challenging the wHo's actions, member states concurred with the interpretation
provided by the wHo bureaucracy that its actions in the context of SarS were
authorised and within acceptable limits of Io behaviour (osieke 1983).
7
this is not to suggest, however, that no aspect of the wHo response to the 2003
SarS pandemic was unprecedented. nor were the nature of the recommendations
and the attention they subsequently generated lost on the wHo bureaucracy. as one
senior WHO official overseeing the revision of the IHr observed,
what I think was relatively new for wHo, at least in the immediate consciousness of the
world, was that people looked very much to the organisation and what it said. and not
just health experts or various ministries of health, but other people looked at it and took
it very seriously. that is unusual. there's nothing in our mandate that says it shouldn't be
done or that is an inappropriate thing for us to do. but I think the balance then between the
organisation saying something and that then being interpreted, moderated, and adapted
by member states, and then given to the public, was a little lost with many of the things
WHO was saying being of direct interest and directly influencing not just members of the
public, but other institutions, other organisations … that caused some change, a shift in
how people perceived the organisation.
8
In fact, it could be conversely argued that the wHo's bureaucracy was not only
entitled to take the actions it did, but also that it was actually obliged to do so,
whether those actions were unprecedented or not. this was possibly no more readily
apparent than in relation to the controversial travel advisories, as pointed out by
David Heymann, who was the executive director of the wHo communicable
Diseases cluster at the time of the pandemic:
before we started making our recommendations there were many countries that had
made advisories that weren't based on anything more than insurance concerns. one
government, for example, recommended no travel to vietnam. they also recommended
that government employees' families living in that country be returned home. these
recommendations were made because the government could not ensure return flights
should their citizens abroad become ill.
9
the case could be made that the wHo, as the world's independent authority on
health matters, had a duty to provide an impartial assessment of the danger to and
from the international public. the wHo's bureaucracy was thus obliged to take the
action it did, the authority to do so flowing naturally from its constitutional powers
