Cabinet adopts amendment of the International Health Regulations
On Wednesday, 16 July 2025, the Federal Cabinet adopted a draft Act on the Amendment of the International Health Regulations (IHR). The amendments aim to enable WHO and the States Parties to respond to pandemics and other public health threats more swiftly and efficiently.
The world community must become better at preparing against global health emergencies. This is a lesson we learned from the coronavirus pandemic. To appropriately respond to a contingency, we need information on its cause and location as quickly as possible. Also, we need labs and hospitals that can handle the spread of emerging infections nationally on the ground, in all countries. Only if we work together as an international community and act swiftly will it be possible going forward to effectively contain global health threats or, ideally, prevent them in the first place.
Key changes
- The International Health Regulations have introduced a definition of “pandemic emergency”. Declaring a pandemic emergency enables the WHO Director-General to issue Temporary Recommendations in a pandemic, as a special form of “public health emergency of international concern”.
- Commitments to “equity” and “solidarity” have also been incorporated into the IHR.
- To speed up reporting to WHO of clusters of cases of severe acute respiratory disease of unknown or novel cause, the relevant testing algorithm has been adjusted.
- States Parties will be required to consult with WHO at an early stage if, in case of certain unclear public health events, the available information is insufficient to decide whether the testing algorithm would support full notification to WHO.
- To better sustain the effective implementation of the Regulations, a States Parties Committee will be set up. The Committee is to support the implementation of and compliance with the IHR.
- To respond to events that have the potential to become a public health emergency of international concern, the States Parties must maintain additional core capacities. The amendments also call for the availability of laboratory diagnostic capacities, (also on the regional level), risk communication capacities, including addressing misinformation and disinformation, as well as capacities for developing guidance for clinical case management.
- To develop the core capacities required for the implementation of the IHR, a Coordinating Financial Mechanism under the authority and guidance of the World Health Assembly is established to make more efficient use of financial resources.
The Act requires the consent of the Bundesrat.
Reform of the International Health Regulations
Concluding two years of work following the COVID-19 pandemic, the WHO member states agreed, at the Seventy-seventh World Health Assembly in June 2024, the critical amendments to the International Health Regulations. To approve the amendments nationally, ratifying legislation is required under the Basic Law. This legislation then enshrines them into German law. This does not affect Germany’s national sovereignty nor national public health protection measures.