Issue

Legal preparedness is a critical component of health security as it can facilitate the prevention, detection, and rapid response to public health emergencies. Law can both hinder or strengthen a wide range of public health emergency prevention, preparedness, and response activities depending on how legal authorities are employed and coordinated. Legal instruments (e.g., constitutions, legislation, regulations, arrêtés, decrees, and applicable international agreements) can help create sustainable legal infrastructure and yield consistent decision-making at all levels before, during, and after an emergency. Yet, to date, there is insufficient attention paid at the local, national, regional, and international levels to the importance of having a strong integrated system of legal preparedness in place ahead of a crisis.

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted a range of legal challenges that arise during a response to a public health emergency or while trying to prevent it, including, but not limited to:

• The need for emergency laws to trigger the operationalization of public health measures;
• Social distancing measures, including quarantine and isolation; and
• Equitable access to medical countermeasures, including diagnostics, vaccine, therapeutics, medical devices, among other topics.

While legal limitations were also observed during past public health emergencies, the magnitude of the problem is significantly more apparent due to the scale of the pandemic, with the pandemic overwhelming national responses and leading to unprecedented morbidity and mortality. The legal challenges experienced by countries therefore call for greater awareness about the importance of public health emergency preparedness for an efficient and effective response as well as for the development of legal tools to achieve more comprehensive preparedness in the future.

Ultimately, legal preparedness saves critical time before, during, and after public health emergencies by ensuring that all requisite legal capacities already exist and have been tested and, whenever possible, potential issues have been resolved in advance.  This means more time and energy can be reserved for the public health, communication, and scientific dimensions of the prevention and response. Additionally, as more countries become better legally prepared for public health emergencies, global health security is strengthened.

The Global Health Security Agenda (GHSA) Legal Preparedness Action Package aims to bring key experts on legal preparedness together to build a solid foundation and common understanding of the competencies necessary for strengthening public health emergency legal preparedness by developing technical tools to guide and support countries in strengthening their capacity as well as advocating for greater global awareness about the role that legal preparedness plays in preventing, preparing for, and responding to public health emergencies.

Strategic Objectives

Outreach and Advocacy

1. Identify and engage relevant stakeholders across multiple sectors and geographic regions, either as new LP AP members or as external partners, to draw upon their respective comparative advantages and strengths for coordinated action to promote, build, and achieve greater legal preparedness.
2. Bring multisectoral awareness and support, including at the local level, to recognize legal preparedness as a critical public health capacity by showing the importance of legal preparedness for health emergency preparedness and response and to achieve global health security outcomes.

Guidance Tools

• Define legal preparedness, its relation to other health security or disaster law capacities, and the importance of sub-national, national, regional, and global legal preparedness to achieve global health security outcomes. Building guidance tools to support domestic and global health security, working with existing mechanisms to support countries in reviewing, developing, and testing legal instruments in place to support overall legal preparedness.

Capacity Building

• Identify and leverage existing efforts, mandates, and tools to develop, refine, and bring to scale approaches to build country capacity (including strengthening sub-national level capacities), incorporate standardized legal benchmarks, and facilitate progress toward legal preparedness for countries to implement priority activities identified in their National Action Plan for Health Security (NAPHS).
• Establish a global learning network to build, at national, regional, and global levels, using a variety of platforms (virtual courses, collaborative webinars, in-person trainings, etc.) to expand legal preparedness competencies within Ministries of Health and other relevant government sectors (Ministries of Finance, Ministries of Justice, etc.) as well as other relevant institutions.