Description
The pandemic caused by COVID 19 can hardly be divorced from the global environmental crisis. In fact, Covid 19 as climate change are both local and global crisis at the same time.
Deploying emergency powers all around the world to face the current crisis brought to the fore no less fractured image of the rule of law at both national and international levels. Inability of many states to react in consistency with international obligations raised, ever debated questions over the legal institution of emergency at the international level.
Crisis is bond to reveal aspects of chaos and inequality. This is particularly when addressing economy, lives and livelihood is to take place within the sense of sustainability and rights. The outbreak of the pandemic has its clear implications on inequalities all around the world. The global economy has been disrupted on a vast scale and loss of jobs and unemployment has seriously affected livelihoods around the world. Considering the decline in the role and structural weakness of international institutions it was not surprising that the World Health Organization (WHO),for example, has clearly struggled to effectively bring national states to adopt a coordinated response.
Climate justice and environmental crises are forms of an international crisis that call again for consideration of legal responses and shed an illuminating light on conflicts as much as they do on progressive capital powers in times of globalization regionally and internationally.
Using a comparative lens, this roundtable engages with states’ responses to the ongoing pandemic across the globe while raising questions over societal values post the pandemic . The discussion will seek to highlight the intersection between the current pandemic and environmental challenges by looking at what this pandemic revealed about the state in terms of shortcomings of international law. The discussion will question whether environmental rule of law is still fit for purpose and how the current pandemic has revealed shifting dynamics between the Global South and Global North.
