Prevention and management of health emergencies

This thesis analyzes the ways in which the fundamental right to health is protected, placing these methods of protection in the current legal and institutional context. A context which, as we will attempt to highlight, differs from previous historical contexts; from a substantive point of view, in that today, especially following the proliferation of epidemics, the narrative of the protection of the right to health is inextricably linked to issues relating to environmental and animal health; from another point of view, the broadening of the paradigm of this right is also reflected in the organizational and institutional dimension of the actors involved in its effective protection. Compared to a more traditional dynamic that reserved the role of absolute protagonist in the protection of rights for the nation state, when the object of protection is placed in today's context, the latter is characterized by a dual dimension: on the one hand, the territorial dimension and, on the other, the supranational dimension. Today's regulatory context in which health protection is placed is characterized by a plurality of regulatory actors. Consequently, the protection of rights takes on a different form than in the past, no longer being reserved for the traditional monopoly of the nation state, which often assumes the role of co-author or, in rarer cases, recipient of regulatory decisions taken at the supranational level. This context also has an impact on the topic under discussion, so the second chapter will focus on analyzing supranational structures and related regulations designed to build a protection system that is capable of overcoming rigid national boundaries. The change in the paradigm of health protection requires a redefinition of its boundaries, which follow the trend of the weakening of national sovereignty in the face of increasingly complex institutional landscapes.Various solutions have been adopted in an attempt to balance the different interests involved—state, territorial, individual, and collective—whose resilience has been tested by the recent pandemic emergency, which, by causing a crisis in national health systems, has structurally and substantially changed the concept of health protection as understood in modern constitutionalism. The recent pandemic experience shows us that the supremacy of the right to health justifies the use of emergency powers and, consequently, becomes a suitable reason for introducing derogations from the organizational structure established at the national level. In light of the reconstruction of the legislative process aimed at enshrining the constitutionally relevant right to health and the organizational structure through which the relative protection is implemented, as well as the derogations introduced to deal with emergency situations, we will attempt, in conclusion, to define the relationship between organization and substantive protection, between healthcare and health in a post-emergency context that has profoundly changed its roots, necessarily supranational but traditionally of fundamental importance.