Repeal “Rights of the Quarantined”
The World Assembly observes the following:
GA 389, “Rights of the Quarantined,” has a fundamentally good goal — it seeks to create coordinated international response to international health crises while respecting the rights of the infected. That a resolution has a good goal, however, should not prevent us from repealing it when the resolution in question also has severe defects.
GA 389, “Rights of the Quarantined,” has severe defects. They are as follows:For these reasons, and hoping for a more measured replacement, the General Assembly hereby repeals GA 389, “Rights of the Quarantined.”
- It fails to address some of the reasons why its predecessor legislation, GA 385, was repealed. In its repeal of GA 385, the World Assembly described itself as “Unsettled by the resolution's mandate to put infected persons in the nearest quarantine to them, causing drastic displacement if a person happened to be far away from their home at the time.” The text it referred to did not change between GA 385 and GA 389. The former, verbatim, required member nations to “move all infected persons into the appropriate quarantine that is nearest to their current location.” The latter, verbatim, required member nations to “move all infected persons into the appropriate quarantine that is nearest to their current location.
- The classification system it shoves upon EPARC is at best unhelpful and at worst harmful. In Section 1, GA 389 “Tasks the Epidemic and Pandemic Alert and Response Center to define as a ‘serious disease’ any disease which is harmful and contagious enough to create the need of a quarantine in the case of an outbreak of the disease.” It is possible that there may be a public health crisis concerning what is, for all intents and purposes, a “serious disease,” but not one where the extreme quarantine prescriptions of this resolution would be appropriate. EPARC should be free to call an illness a serious disease without authorizing the extensive quarantine procedures in GA 389 — it is important that public health officials communicate openly and honestly about the science of epidemiology, without fear of political backlash or forcing a specific policy on member nations.
- The quarantine provisions of Section 4 inadequately address the role of at-home quarantines in the epidemic responses of nations battling “serious diseases.” Per Section 4e, member nations must “disband all quarantines of a certain epidemic when the epidemic ends.” Given the text of 4e., it seems unlikely that “quarantine” areas under the resolution include the houses of the infected, which presumably cannot be “disbanded.” The World Assembly lacks guidance on what the “disbanding” of a home quarantine would look like if indeed it did fall under the definition of a quarantine provided by GA 389.
- The resolution, at times, has backwards priorities. The provisions that GA 389 prescribes for epidemics are quite drastic: they ask that member nations forcibly relocate citizens to quarantines. These provisions are helpful in some circumstances: primarily before an outbreak occurs, when small numbers of people can be kept in a limited number of quarantine areas to prevent a disease from taking hold. GA 389, however, makes no such provision for quarantine in these circumstances. Instead, it defines an epidemic as “a time, in a nation, when there are enough people with the same serious disease (as defined by the EPARC) to be clearly in excess of the normal expectancy.” By defining epidemics as occurring in places where a disease is “clearly in excess of the normal expectancy,” it only authorizes the extreme response when an outbreak has already occurred. At this stage of an epidemic, it is possible that the policies proposed by the resolution are impossible to implement. They would have been better implemented before disease levels were “in excess of the normal expectancy.”
I look forward to any comments you may have on this proposal: I was looking through the WA's passed resolutions a couple days ago, and given the current state of affairs, I looked at public health law. This felt like it aged pretty badly vis a vis COVID-19. I could be wrong, though. I'm also not sure if the interpretation I offer in Reason C is correct. I would appreciate input on that.
In the meantime, I'm providing links to both GA 389 (the target), GA 387 (the repeal of its predecessor), and GA 385 (the predecessor).
GA 389
https://www.nationstates.net/page=WA_pa ... /council=1
GA 385
https://www.nationstates.net/page=WA_pa ... /council=1
GA 387
https://www.nationstates.net/page=WA_pa ... /council=1