Quora Answer: Should the Global Community Sue China for the Coronavirus Epidemic?

The following is my answer to a Quora question: “Should the global community sue China for hiding the truth about the coronavirus, for spreading it across the globe, which has caused many deaths and affected the world economy?”

There are a few notions that should be disabused here, since this is actually a question of sovereign and state immunity.

Firstly, China claims absolute sovereign immunity, meaning that the government, its representatives, and state actors do not recognise any suit as legitimate or enforceable.  In the context of the international community, the most likely major potential claimant would be the United States.  However, the US, like most nations, guarantee some form of state immunity in this statutes.  There has to be a major incentive, and a lot of legal manoeuvring to actually bring such a suit to court.  In the context of a legal or natural persons, where individually, or in a class action suit, I cannot see any basis where such a claim would be admissible, and be credible.

Secondly, any such case would be very weak.  The Covid-19 infections have been declared a global pandemic by the World Health Organisation.  This means any force majeure clause would be invoked.  This is a natural phenomenon.  You can no more blame China for the virus than you can blame Kansas for the tornadoes.

If the basis of the suit is China’s handling of the virus, any claim of mismanagement of containment would apply to many European nations, and the United States itself.  In fact, the US is rewriting the playbook on how to mismanage a pandemic on an epic scale.  They are not even doing a credible job of shifting the blame.  Even that claim is difficult to prove since the original epicentre had no inkling how serious it would eventually become.

Assuming some nation managed to rule in such an unlikely case against China, how are they going to bully the 2^nd largest economy, and Permanent Member of the UN Security Council, in the world into paying?  What is the US going to do?  Throw a tantrum, and threaten to tweet them to death?  It is an unenforceable waste of time.