COVID 19 Pandemic Threats International Peace

Abstract

In 2014, the UN Security Council adopted its historic Resolution 2177, which declared that the Ebola virus considered as a threat to international peace under the provisions of Article 39 of the Charter of the United Nations. This decision was the first time that the Council decided that a health issue constituted as a threat to international peace. Before that, the Security Council included a health issue on its agenda in  2000 to start the third millennium with a discussion of a health issue, which is AIDS, and  a resolution 1308was issued  to establish the council for a new understanding of the concept of a threat to international peace. The concept of threat of international peace has evolved through many stages starting from close connection with the use of weapons and the outbreak of conflict, expansion to include the use of nuclear weapons and then to give the waves of migrants as a threat to international peace leading to outbreaks of epidemics and highly contagious diseases that can be as harmful and destructive as war itself. The importance of the classification of COVID 19 as a threat to international peace lies in the effects that it has caused so far, as it affected more than ten million people until the writing of this article and forced countries around the globe to stop most transactions between them in addition, stopping global flying with an absence of treatment and a significant weakness in health services for a plethora of countries of the world.  The decision to consider a situation as a threat to international peace is an exclusive jurisdiction of the Security Council, this article examines the convictions that led the Council to consider Ebola as a threat to the international peace and apply of those convictions on the Corona virus (COVID 19) to measure the ability of COVID 19 to be identified as a threat to international peace. Including a health issue on the agenda of the Security Council and obtaining a resolution threatening international peace, is a departure from the traditional understanding of the concept of Article 39 of the Charter that links the threat of peace and the use of weapons to a stage that accepts other threats such as epidemics.