Abstract

In order to contain the spread of COVID-19 and protect public health, more than 50 States have introduced, since the beginning of the pandemic, restrictions on the export of personal protective equipment (PPE). This contribution aims to assess the consistency of these measures with the WTO legal framework and their compatibility with the needs for international solidarity and the obligations to cooperate to the protection of the right to health, especially towards the developing and least developed countries on which the distorting effects of the measures most dramatically reverberate. To this end, the paper devotes special attention to the measures introduced by the European Union – removed at the end of May 2020 – the effects of which it assesses ex post.