The Law of Responsibility and the World Health Organisation: A Case Study on the West African Ebola Outbreak

The delay between the WHO being made aware of the 2014 Ebola epidemic in West Africa and declaring it a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) has been the subject of some considerable criticism in the literature, as well as in the Report of the Ebola Interim Assessment Panel commissioned by the WHO, which stated that that ‘significant and unjustifiable delays occurred in the declaration of a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) by WHO.’ This paper examines this late declaration of a PHEIC for Ebola through the lens of the law of responsibility, arguing that the WHO incurs responsibility for this delay. The law of responsibility is long standing in international law as the framework for providing redress for breaches of law. It gives rise to an obligation to provide redress and ensures some form of culpability for a breach of international law. In this paper we argue that the WHO does not merely have the power to declare a PHEIC via the International Health Regulations (2005), but also has a legal obligation to do so when the criteria are met. An obligation which we argue, they breached in failing to declare the recent Ebola outbreak in West Africa a PHEIC in a timely manner. This breach should then engage the law of responsibility for the consequences of the delay. The paper argues, however, that there exist substantial issues with the application of the principles of responsibility to international organizations.