Ebola and the Airplane – Securing Mobility Through Regime Interactions And Legal Adaptation

This article concentrates on a particular controversy during the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa; the mass cancellation of flights to and from affected countries. This occurred despite authoritative advice against such restrictions from the World Health Organisation (WHO). During a public health emergency such as Ebola, the airplane sits at a site of regulatory uncertainty as it falls within the scope of two specialist and overlapping domains of international law; the WHO International Health Regulations (2005) and the Convention on International Civil Aviation. We explore how legal technicalities and objects, by promoting functional interactions between these two specialised regimes of law, were utilised to deal with this uncertainty. We show how the form and function of these mundane tools had a significant impact; assimilating aviation further into the system of global health security as well as instrumentalising the aircraft as a tool of disease surveillance. This encounter of regimes was law creating, resulting in new international protocols and standards designed to enable the resumption of flights in and out of countries affected by outbreaks. This article therefore offers significant and original insights into the hidden work performed by legal techniques and tools in dealing with regime overlap. Our findings contribute to the wider international law literature on fragmentation and enrich our understanding of the significance of relational regime interactions in international law

Understanding human rights obligations of states engaged in public activity overseas:the case of transnational education

Legal consideration of extraterritorial obligations contained in the European Convention of Human Rights have largely developed in respect of military occupation or the custodial control of individuals. For a number of reasons situations involving transnational cooperation have received little judicial scrutiny. This paper examines human rights concerns associated with the rapidly expanding field of transnational education an activity frequently reliant on interstate cooperation. By re-examining the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights the legal obligations of countries establishing engaged in public activity overseas are explored. The analysis is structured around a case study on the oversight of a European education facility affected by Bahrain’s controversial response to pro-reform protests