The Emergency Committee under the International Health Regulations (IHR), the binding treaty governing cross-border outbreak response, convened on 19 May1. This is the standing expert panel that Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus had bypassed when he declared the Bundibugyo emergency faster than procedure normally allows. Its Temporary Recommendations, issued 22 May, call for exit screening at borders, 21-day contact tracing and safe burials, and explicitly advise against travel or trade restrictions2. The committee confirmed the emergency but stopped short of the higher Pandemic Emergency tier.
The 2005 IHR replaced cordon-style border closures with exit screening at source precisely because the West Africa Ebola response in 2014 showed that bans drive disease underground without stopping it: travellers hide their movements and slip in by other routes. By advising exit screening and against entry bans, the committee is enforcing the rule the regulations were rewritten to encode, not weighing options afresh.
That advice arrives into a contradiction. A 21-day entry ban from a major power was already in force when the recommendations published, which sets the committee's codified guidance directly against a member state's unilateral measure within the same week. The committee can recommend, but the IHR carries no enforcement teeth; its authority rests on reciprocity, the expectation that states follow shared rules because they need others to. When that breaks, the treaty's recommendations become advice a government can read and ignore.
