Talk of ‘COVID passports’ as a means of proving a person’s vaccination status has increased in recent weeks. Ronan Cormacain argues that rule of law concerns necessitate that COVID passports must be created and regulated by primary legislation, which must be given time for proper parliamentary scrutiny. They should not be brought about by secondary legislation, as has been the case with a significant amount of pandemic-related legislation.

The so-called COVID passport is a way of ‘proving’ a person’s COVID status. This blogpost makes three arguments. Firstly, that the use of COVID passports ought to be regulated, secondly that that regulation ought to be by way of legislation, and thirdly that that legislation needs to be an Act of Parliament.

There are many forms such a passport could take: digital or non-digital, domestic only or international, relating to the presence of COVID antibodies or vaccination status, etc. Furthermore, there are many important questions around the content of such a law: the justification of requiring a passport, scope, international recognition, protections, necessity and proportionality, time limits on regulation, etc. This post does not address any of these questions, focusing not on the detail of any law regulating them, instead simply arguing that there should be a law regulating the matter in the UK.

Autonomous moral actors in an unregulated market, or heteronomous rules imposed upon a regulated market

John Locke’s almost mythical conception of a pre-Commonwealth era was of autonomous individuals perfectly free to make their own moral choices. There were no externally imposed rules, and we were all individuals with complete power to determine our own actions. Or as Locke put it: ‘a state of perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of Nature, without asking leave or depending upon the will of any other [person]’.

At the time of writing, COVID passports, or more specifically, the right to treat a person in a particular way depending upon whether or not they have a COVID passport, occupies a near Lockean regulation-free space. There is no rule that a publican may refuse entry to a person without a passport, but nor is there a law that specifically prohibits him from doing so. There is no rule that a health worker must only be employed if they have a passport, but nor is there a specific protection for those who don’t have one. Aside from the regulation of travellers to England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland (who must be in possession of a negative COVID test result), this is a law-free zone.