This episode of Pod Bless Canada features a conversation between MLI’s Director for the Centre for Advancing Canada’s Interests Abroad, Shuvaloy Majumdar, and Sarah Teich, a Canadian attorney and consultant who is the author of the Institute’s most recent paper titled “Not Immune – Exploring liability of authoritarian regimes for the COVID-19 pandemic and its cover-up.”
Teich’s paper argues that hundreds of thousands of deaths and trillions of dollars in economic damages could have been prevented had countries like China and Iran not engaged in illegal cover-ups regarding the COVID-19 pandemic. Luckily, Teich outlines that there are a wide array of domestic and international legal tools available to hold regimes like China and Iran to account.
Majumdar and Teich explore the paper and what the next moves are for policy makers as they consider state liability for the COVID-19 pandemic.