Keep talking while everything gets sequenced: How the Pandemic Agreement, Global Health, and Genetic Resource Governance Are Keeping Pace with Digitization?

Sylvain Aubry;Christine Frison;Walckiers, Pierre
(2025) ESIL Annual Conference 2025 RECONSTRUCTING INTERNATIONAL LAW - IG on International Health Law — Location: Berlin, Germany (10.September.2025)

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One of the most prominent global responses to COVID-19 has been the development of a new multilateral agreement to help address future pandemics. Under the auspices of the World Health Organization, the Pandemic Agreement was intended to strengthen equity, transparency, and cooperation in global public health, while internationally recognising the principles of One Health and the importance of the rapid sharing of data and benefit-sharing related to the use of genomic sequences, with reference to access and benefit-sharing mechanisms. In the aftermath of the vote for a Pandemic Agreement by the 77th World Health Assembly in May 2025, the parties agreed on a core text, while leaving the details of a Pathogens Access and Benefit-Sharing mechanism open for new negotiations in the year(s) to come. While the intergovernmental health negotiations had to be held in a challenging context for the WHO, including contestation, fake news about public health measures, and the withdrawal of the United States and Argentina, they also had to confront the same transversal issues facing all ABS and ABS-related instruments. The environmental and health governance appears fragmented and increasingly outpaced by the phenomenon of the dematerialization of genetic resources, particularly for pathogens Digital Sequence Information. Genomics, as the cornerstone of modern biology, continues to develop, but no standardised governance solution has emerged for the data it produces. Long considered a mere technical detail in the global governance of genetic resources, the digitization of genomic data has now become a central issue cutting across multiple international frameworks dealing with genetic resources in the fields of health, human genomics, agriculture, and terrestrial and marine biodiversity. By adopting a critical approach to international law within the context of regime complexes, we analyse the challenges associated explicitly with the Pathogens Access and Benefit-Sharing mechanisms, particularly in light of ongoing debates regarding Digital Sequence Information in other forums addressing global health, biodiversity, and genetic resources. We explore how the proliferation of institutional arrangements and legal fragmentation—essentially confronting similar issues but with differing governance processes, stakeholders, or geographical scopes— is influencing the future of the Access and Benefit Sharing regime complex. While equity has emerged as a central concern in multilateral environmental negotiations and the Pandemic Agreement, we consider the potential for an increasingly fragmented institutional framework to effectively address global challenges such as the biodiversity crisis or future pandemics.
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Sylvain Aubry, Christine Frison, & Walckiers, P. (2025). Keep talking while everything gets sequenced: How the Pandemic Agreement, Global Health, and Genetic Resource Governance Are Keeping Pace with Digitization? ESIL Annual Conference 2025 RECONSTRUCTING INTERNATIONAL LAW - IG on International Health Law, Berlin, Germany. https://doi.org/10.4337/jghl.2026.01.03