Last week, Dr. Ayelet Berman presented at the Reconstructing the Legal Framework for Global Health Governance in the Post-Pandemic Era symposium organized by the Vanke School of Public Health at Tsinghua in Beijing, China.

At the event, Dr. Berman presented on The WHO Pandemic Agreement and International Health Regulations (IHR): Implementation Challenges and Approaches. She stressed the problem of international treaty implementation in general, and the IHR in particular. She explained why implementation continues to remain such as major problem, highlighting the key capacity, political and governmental barriers to implementation. She then suggested that states can choose between "carrots" and "sticks" when designing implementation mechanisms, and that there are a variety of implementation mechanism models along a soft to hard continuum, with softer mechanisms focusing on assisting states in their compliance and harder ones sanctioning states in cases of non-compliance. Against this background, she examined the nature of the implementation mechanisms contained in the draft WHO pandemic agreement as well as those proposed  by member states for the revised IHR. Her presentation slides are available here.