This article discusses some of the challenges posed by the introduction of COVID-19 certificates as a privileged tool for opening up mobility and access in order to restore a semblance of normality to social life. While at present there is no international consensus either on how – or why – such certificates should be used or on how they should be designed and applied, a growing number of countries have already introduced COVID-19 certificates in one form or another. Yet the scientific community as well as the World Health Organisation (WHO) have expressed caution, noting that such certificates might disproportionately discriminate against people on the basis of race, religion and socioeconomic background, as well as on the basis of age due to the sequencing of the vaccine rollout. Indeed, while the new COVID-19 certificates may appear to promise a magical solution enabling us to free up global mobility and reopen economies, they actually risk creating new borders and new forms of inequality through an exclusionary sorting and profiling mechanism that delimits “safe” from “unsafe” bodies, based on differential access to “immuno-privilege” – but also differential forms of “bio-securitisation”. They also provide an illusion of pandemic safety – assuring citizens that through the “fetish” of the certificate “safe travel” can magically be reinstated. Securing territories and populations has always been, in Foucauldian terms, a matter of “making a division between good and bad circulation and maximizing the good circulation by diminishing the bad”. We can therefore reasonably expect growing contestation, including before courts, around COVID-19 certificates in their different national and international iterations, as their inherently discriminatory nature and other unintended consequences such as those stemming from the use of persuasive – as opposed to the more traditional coercive – governmental power begin to unfold in their performative trajectory.

With the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic entering its second year, public and private actors alike grow eager to achieve some semblance of normality. In this context, the idea of “vaccination passports” or “immunity certificates” as a means of resuming social and economic activity has been gaining momentum all around the world. This article aims to provide a legal analysis of this initiative through the lens of the proportionality principle. A proportionality test is conducted in order to determine whether the degree of infringement of the human rights implicated is balanced by the potential of a certification system to mitigate the risks of the virus. The results from this analysis show that the targeted aims can be achieved through already existing measures with a lesser impact on civil and fundamental human rights. Moreover, in a context of uncertainty around the immunopathology of COVID-19, the introduction of these certificates presents ethical and scientific challenges, which lead us to believe that this measure is unlikely to play a central role in stopping the spread of the disease, and it could set the pace for a dangerous precedent, allowing for extensive discrimination and exacerbating already existing inequalities and disparities.

On 17 March 2021, the European Commission put forward its Proposal for a Regulation on Digital Green Certificates, which would facilitate European Union (EU) cross-border movement during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Regulation on the EU Digital COVID Certificate was adopted on 14 June 2021 and it will start to apply from 1 July 2021. This article examines the main declared goals of the new Regulation – the first being that Digital COVID Certificates facilitate safe cross-border movement, the second being that they preclude more restrictive national measures, the third being that they prevent discrimination and the fourth being that they coordinate Member States’ actions. In so doing, it highlights the main benefits and weaknesses of the Regulation, but it also goes beyond the Regulation by tackling broader questions of EU law that will be of relevance even once the pandemic is over. In this respect, the paper highlights the importance of science in assessing the proportionality of pandemic-related measures and of choosing the least restrictive and the most individualised options when restricting free movement due to public health reasons. It also identifies the effects EU certificates will have on Member States’ regulation of national COVID-19 certificates, notably those designed for other purposes than cross-border travel, and it shows that there is a thin line between the EU’s and national competences in this area.

Israel’s vaccination percentage was among the highest recorded worldwide. The Israeli government opted for a model using a proof-of-vaccine document (“Green Pass”). However, the “Green Pass” policy raises practical, legal and ethical concerns. While immunisation passports could be utilised to protect one’s health, significant legal difficulties arise from their usage as a vaccination encouragement scheme. Protecting health is a proper purpose, particularly as minimising the pandemic ameliorates the human rights violations that stem from the COVID-19 response, enables individuals to return to their daily lives and enhances economic activity. However, any privileges or restrictions guided by one’s COVID-19 immunisation status must be designed with the utmost attention to prevent a disproportionate violation of the human rights of the non-vaccinated and the public at large. Furthermore, as “Green Pass” policies might entrench existing discriminatory structures, ensuring equality is vital in moving forward. By exploring two case studies – labour rights and the right to privacy – we demonstrate the legal and public implications of the “Green Pass” regime. Despite the removal of the “Green Pass” in Israel, discussions continue regarding its modified reimplementation. The wider implications of the model might extend beyond its specific legal arrangements and limited temporal phase, requiring us to bring long-term public health into consideration.

At the international level, proof of vaccination against SARS-CoV-2 offers an enticing promise to the return of normality, particularly for the much-desired reopening of national borders. At the same time, vaccination passports could be a false hope: the requirement of vaccine passports could adversely embed social and economic inequalities that reflect the power dynamics in international relations. Specifically, the ability to secure vaccines relates to the varying market and economic power across countries. This paper focuses on Taiwan as a case study to explore ways in which the use of COVID-19 certifications, if used as a precondition for international travel, would further exacerbate a binary of exclusion and inclusion as a function of geopolitics. With its relative success in containing the COVID-19 pandemic within its borders, Taiwan represents a low priority for vaccine distribution in the COVAX initiative. Furthermore, due to Taiwan’s contentious political status and its exclusion from the World Health Organization regime, if vaccination passports are required as a precondition for international travel, then outbound passengers from Taiwan potentially could be subjected to restriction of movement absent wide availability of vaccines domestically. This paper argues that insofar as sustainable pandemic control requires a global concerted effort, vaccination passports could further polarise a global response. This paper suggests that equitable access to effective vaccines worldwide and governance reform of global health would help to rebuild global solidarity and mitigate the unimaginable human, social and economic suffering arising from the pandemic.

This article further develops the concept of algorithmic vulnerability. The analysis is built on empirical evidence of the Chinese Health Code System (HCS), compared to similar plans for the “COVID-19 Certificate” in the European Union (EU). Implementing the HCS has shown two-sided regulatory implications: improving social protection (a national strategy, a common mutual-recognition standard, scaled-up public–private cooperation) and increasing risks of social exclusion (non-digital and digital forms of vulnerability). This article argues that algorithmic vulnerability is caused by mismatches between biased databases, unfairly pre-designed algorithms and dynamically changed risk groups in reality in the context of COVID-19 vaccination. It contributes a framework for deploying plans for digital certificates in the EU concerning minimising the social risks associated with algorithmic vulnerability. The framework consists of (1) reinforcing existing vulnerability inherited from non-digital society (eg caused by intersectional factors of race/ethnicity, gender, age and health) and (2) introducing new forms of vulnerability generated by algorithm design and implementation (eg excluding the risk groups of individuals who are un/mis/overrepresented in the databases, such as those defined by nationality plus COVID-19 status).

Socioeconomic disadvantages are amplified by the COVID-19 pandemic all over the world. Public actions and omissions severely affect the poor, alongside their precarious living, health and working conditions. As we slowly prepare for the aftermath of the pandemic, thanks to the progression of vaccination, especially in developed countries, certain measures taken in this context, more specifically the “vaccination certificates”, are likely particularly to affect the poor, who usually also belong to other vulnerable groups such as ethnic minorities or single parents, and could eventually constitute for them a state of permanent quarantine. In this contribution, I argue that COVID-19 vaccination certificates are a slippery slope towards exclusion and stigmatisation of the poor through a bureaucratic system based on privileges that raises important questions in light of the fundamental rights of the people who reside at society’s margins, struggling to conform to the “phantom of normalcy”.

This paper argues that COVID-19 has triggered a multiplication of heterogeneous bordering mechanisms that, far from stopping movement as such, have enhanced hierarchies of mobility. In particular, it shows that a confinement continuum has been put in place in the name of the “contain to protect” principle: migrants have been subjected to protracted lockdown measures in the name of their own protection. The piece concludes by interrogating how to rearticulate critique in COVID times in light of the enforcement of discriminatory “passports to freedom” (COVID-19 travel certificates).

The global volume of travel has grown steadily for decades and hence the border closures and travel restrictions in response to COVID-19 have created an unforeseen impact on the number of international border crossings. In air traffic alone the data show a striking 75.6% decrease in the number of scheduled international passengers. We might hasten to think that the strict travel restrictions due to the COVID-19 crisis have in principle treated mobile populations equally – for once we have all been banned from travelling. We could even consider the recent initiatives to introduce “vaccination certificates” as a fair and democratic way to reintroduce safe international travelling. In reality, the idea of a COVID-19 certificate is but a new layer in the broader landscape of highly uneven global mobility where travellers’ citizenship and place of origin truly matter. This article discusses some of the major inequalities embedded in the global mobility regime and argues that the idea of the COVID-19 certificate as an equaliser remains completely disconnected from these underlying realities. To conclude, the article discusses problems related to uneven access to digital travel documents, such as the proposed COVID-19 certificate.

On 20 May 2021, the European Commission, Council and Parliament announced a breakthrough in the trialogue negotiations to establish the European Union (EU) Digital COVID Certificate. Originally, this standardisation effort was labelled as “Digital Green Certificate” and – “[i]n view of the urgency” – presented without a data protection impact assessment. It should allow citizens and residents of Member States to prove that they are either vaccinated against COVID-19, have recently tested negative or are currently immune against the virus. This article considers the proposal from a privacy perspective, taking into account the opinion of EU data protection authorities, ongoing negotiations in the EU institutions and relevant developments on the national and international level. While the European Parliament and others tried to improve the original Commission proposal, questions around the appropriateness and effectiveness of the framework remain. The technological and organisational implementation is essentially left to Member States, who already have started to develop their own tracing and identification systems.

Digital vaccination certification involves making many promises, few of which can realistically be kept. In this paper, we demonstrate how this phenomenon constitutes various forms of theatre – immunity theatre, border theatre, behavioural theatre and equality theatre – doing so by drawing on perspectives from technology regulation, migration studies and critical geopolitics. Technological theatre and political theatre often serve valid functions, but these forms are problematic for several reasons. First, they involve real-world infrastructures that, while unlikely to accomplish the task at hand, will nevertheless last a long time and be repurposed. They therefore constitute governance by data infrastructure, diverting action and control away from elected legislators to for-profit contractors. Second, vaccine certification effectively legitimises inequalities between countries and people by formalising ways to distinguish between the vaccinated and non-vaccinated and to exclude the latter, thus reinforcing both mobility and connectivity divides. It serves as a way to (further) close borders and to regulate, through code and infrastructure, access to public goods such as employment and public space. Finally, the project of certification displaces a more important action, namely addressing the radical inequality in countries’ ability to combat the pandemic.

The extensive disruption to and digital transformation of travel administration across borders largely due to COVID-19 mean that digital vaccine passports are being developed to resume international travel and kick-start the global economy. Currently, a wide range of actors are using a variety of different approaches and technologies to develop such a system. This paper considers the techno-ethical issues raised by the digital nature of vaccine passports and the application of leading-edge technologies such as blockchain in developing and deploying them. We briefly analyse four of the most advanced systems – IBM’s Digital Health Passport “Common Pass,” the International Air Transport Association’s Travel Pass, the Linux Foundation Public Health’s COVID-19 Credentials Initiative and the Vaccination Credential Initiative (Microsoft and Oracle) – and then consider the approach being taken for the EU Digital COVID Certificate. Each of these raises a range of issues, particularly relating to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the need for standards and due diligence in the application of innovative technologies (eg blockchain) that will directly challenge policymakers when attempting to regulate within the network of networks.

The Digital Green Certificate (DGC) proposed by the European Commission on the basis of facilitating the free movement rights of European Union (EU) citizens will be capable of effectively serving as a COVID-19 passport. In this contribution, we cast doubt on whether the DGC is fit for purpose, highlighting in particular the potential for the DGC to in fact facilitate greater free movement restrictions for a large number of EU citizens, in particular those who have received non- European Medicines Agency (EMA)-approved vaccines such as Sputnik V in compliance with EU law. Under the proposal as amended by the European Parliament, any destination Member State that accepts proof of vaccination “in order to waive restrictions to free movement” must apply the same waiver to any DGC-holder that has received an EMA-approved vaccine and has the option of doing so for vaccines added to the World Health Organization (WHO) Emergency Use Listing; however, such equal treatment is not available for DGC-holders who have received non-EMA/WHO vaccines. While this measure was alleged to be taken on grounds of public health, a convincing public health case has not been put forward. Instead, the DGC proposal as it stands disregards the promise of the internal market and sets the stage for its fragmentation through geopolitics and bilateralism.

While, historically, alcohol production and sale were local matters, commercialised and industrialised alcohol has supervened, globalised initially through European empires, transforming alcohol’s place in everyday life. But alcohol was not included in the current international drug control system, initiated in 1912. In the current “UN system” of 35 intergovernmental agencies, alcohol has been a recurrent concern in the work only of the World Health Organization (WHO). Examples are given of the sporadic involvement in alcohol issues of other agencies, and the history of WHO’s involvement between 1950 and early 2020 is briefly described. At WHO, the place of alcohol programming in its structure and which other topics it is linked with have been recurrent issues. Civil society support for alcohol initiatives has been comparatively weak, and alcohol industry counter-pressure has been strong. Alcohol issues have thus received less attention at the intergovernmental level than the harm would justify. Constraining factors have included not only lobbying by industry interests, but also the multi-sectoral nature of alcohol problems and the international cultural position of alcohol as a luxury good served at gatherings of political and media elites.

This article proposes and discusses the text of a Framework Convention on Alcohol Control, which would serve public health and welfare interests. The history of alcohol’s omission from current drug treaties is briefly discussed. The paper spells out what should be covered in the treaty, using text adapted primarily from the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, but for the control of trade from the 1961 narcotic drugs treaty. While the draft provides for the treaty to be negotiated under the auspices of the World Health Organization, other auspices are possible. Excluding alcohol industry interests from the negotiation of the treaty is noted as an important precondition. The articles in the draft treaty and their purposes are briefly described, and the divergences from the tobacco treaty are described and justified. The text of the draft treaty is provided as Supplementary Material. Specification of concrete provisions in a draft convention points the way towards more effective global actions and agreements on alcohol control, whatever form they take.

Alcohol control has long been recognised as a public health concern. Recent years have also seen increased recognition of the relationship between alcohol control and the human rights agenda. However, fragmentation exists in key global governance instruments over the role alcohol control plays as a human rights priority. The relative success of tobacco control illustrates how utilisation of agendas beyond public health can mobilise action.

Occupying the dual space of psychoactive substances and food, alcohol has to date escaped the international labelling standards required of either category. Following growing consumer concern focused on ingredient and energy labelling, the issue of alcohol labelling has been brought to the Codex Committee on Food Labelling (CCFL). Russia led the development of a discussion paper on the labelling of alcohol beverages, which was debated in May 2019. The discussion paper presented five policy options, ranging from doing nothing to initiating open-ended work on a new Codex standard. The progression of alcohol labelling through the CCFL raises a number of issues for public health advocates, as placing alcohol within the scope of the Codex clearly places labelling within the food system and has the potential to side-line health labelling concerns. This paper will first describe the process leading to the consideration of alcohol labelling at the CCFL and then consider the health and advocacy implications of the different options proposed to progress the work plan.

This article addresses the question of how the World Health Organization (WHO) Global Strategy to Reduce the Harmful Use of Alcohol (Global Strategy) and its Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) have been used in the context of discussions about alcohol and tobacco measures, respectively, in the World Trade Organization (WTO) Committee on Technical Barriers to Trade. The article finds considerable differences not only in the extent to which the FCTC is used compared to the Global Strategy , but also in the ways in which the two global health instruments have been used in the WTO context. The article proffers three key reasons for these differences: the legal status of the instrument; the content of the instrument in terms of whether it contains guidance as to the use of detailed, evidence-based measures; and the role and legitimacy that the instrument accords to the relevant industry interests. The article considers how the insights from the research can inform the developments in global governance of alcohol that are underway in WHO policy. It also positions its findings in terms of the wider international law debates about hard law versus soft law, and whether different types of international regulatory instruments and the legal status of these instruments impact their effectiveness in supporting domestic public health measures.

Alcohol is the sole major psychoactive substance with a huge negative public health and social impact without some form of international control grounded in a binding treaty. While existing rules of international law, in particular in the economic field, favour liberalisation and may hinder strong national alcohol control measures, we may be witnessing a turning of the tide due to the growing mobilisation against non-communicable diseases. The Framework Convention on Tobacco Control has been a ground-breaking development in this sense, and has led policymakers and advocates in a number of countries to raise the possibility of a similar convention on alcohol control. The present contribution compares tobacco and alcohol from this perspective and considers the feasibility of a dedicated international convention. It concludes that the political prospects of a movement in this direction are very dim at the present time; however, policy developments on other health problems and theoretical models emerging from constructivist international relations scholarship may open up promising perspectives for considering normative and institutional approaches that could strengthen the existing legal framework and facilitate political processes towards stronger forms of legalisation of global alcohol control.