(The Defender) Secretive negotiations took place this week in Geneva, Switzerland, to discuss proposed amendments to the World Health Organization’s (WHO) International Health Regulations (IHR), considered a binding instrument of international law.
Similar negotiations took place last month for drafting a new WHO pandemic treaty.
While the two are often conflated, the proposed IHR amendments and the proposed pandemic treaty represent two separate but related sets of proposals that would fundamentally alter the WHO’s ability to respond to “public health emergencies” throughout the world — and, critics warn, significantly strip nations of their sovereignty.
According to author and researcher James Roguski, these two proposals would transform the WHO from an advisory organization to a global governing body whose policies would be legally binding.
They also would greatly expand the scope and reach of the IHR, institute a system of global health certificates and “passports” and allow the WHO to mandate medical examinations, quarantine and treatment.
Roguski said the proposed documents would give the WHO power over the means of production during a declared pandemic, call for the development of IHR infrastructure at “points of entry” (such as national borders), redirect billions of dollars to the “Pharmaceutical Hospital Emergency Industrial Complex” and remove mention of “respect for dignity, human rights and fundamental freedoms of people.”
Francis Boyle, J.D., Ph.D., professor of international law at the University of Illinois, said the proposed documents may also contravene international law.
Boyle, author of several international law textbooks and a bioweapons expert who drafted the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, recently spoke with The Defender about the dangers — and potential illegality — of these two proposed documents
Other prominent analysts also sounded the alarm.
Proposals would create ‘worldwide totalitarian medical and scientific police state’
Meeting in Geneva between Jan. 9-13, the WHO’s IHR Review Committee worked to develop “technical recommendations to the [WHO’s] Director-General on amendments proposed by State Parties to the IHR,” according to a WHO document.
The IHR was first enacted in 2005, in the aftermath of SARS-CoV-1, and took effect in 2007. They constitute one of only two legally binding treaties the WHO has achieved since its inception in 1948 — the other being the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control.
As previously reported by The Defender, the IHR framework already allows the WHO director-general to declare a public health emergency in any country, without the consent of that country’s government, though the framework requires the two sides to first attempt to reach an agreement.
According to the same WHO document, the recommendations of the IHR Review Committee and the member states’ Working Group on Amendments to the International Health Regulations (2005) (WGIHR) will be reported to WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus by mid-January, in the leadup to the WHO’s 76th World Health Assembly in late May.
Boyle said he questioned the legality of the above documents, citing for instance the fact that “the proposed WHO treaty violates the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties,” which was ratified in 1969, and which Boyle described as “the international law of treaties for every state in the world.”
Boyle explained the difference between the latest pandemic treaty and IHR proposals. “The WHO treaty would set up a separate international organization, whereas the proposed regulations would work within the context of the WHO we have today.”
However, he said, “Having read through both of them, it’s a distinction without a difference.” He explained:
“Either one or both will set up a worldwide totalitarian medical and scientific police state under the control of Tedros and the WHO, which are basically a front organization for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Tony Fauci, Bill Gates, Big Pharma, the biowarfare industry and the Chinese Communist government that pays a good chunk of their bills.
“Either they’ll get the regulations or they’ll get the treaty, but both are existentially dangerous. These are truly dangerous, existentially dangerous and insidious documents.”
Boyle, who has written extensively on international law and argued cases on behalf of Palestine and Bosnia in the International Court of Justice, told The Defender he has “never read treaties and draft international organizations that are so completely totalitarian as the IHR regulations and the WHO treaty,” adding:
“Either one or both will set up a totalitarian medical and scientific police state that will be beyond the control of national, state and local government authorities.
“Both the IHR regulations and the WHO treaty, as far as I can tell from reading them, are specifically designed to circumvent national, state and local government authorities when it comes to pandemics, the treatment for pandemics and also including in there, vaccines.”
Talks for both the proposed pandemic treaty and the proposed IHR amendments appear to follow a similar timeline, in order to be submitted for consideration during the WHO’s World Health Assembly May 21-30.
“It’s clear to me they are preparing both the regulations and the treaty for adoption by the World Health Assembly in May of 2023,” Boyle said. “That’s where we stand right now as I see it.”
According to the WHO, the International Negotiating Body (INB) working on the Pandemic Treaty will present a “progress report” at the May meeting, with a view toward presenting its “final outcome” to the 77th World Health Assembly in May 2024.
Boyle: proposed legally-binding pandemic treaty violates international law
Commenting on the pandemic treaty, Tedros said, “The lessons of the pandemic must not go unlearned.” He described the current “conceptual zero draft” of the treaty as “a true reflection of the aspirations for a different paradigm for strengthening pandemic prevention, preparedness, response and recovery.”
Roguski, in his analysis of the “Pandemic Treaty,” warned that it will create a “legally binding framework convention that would hand over enormous additional, legally binding authority to the WHO.”
The WHO’s 194 member states would, in other words, “agree to hand over their national sovereignty to the WHO.” This would “dramatically expand the role of the WHO,” by including an “entirely new bureaucracy,” the “Conference of the Parties,” which would include not just member states but “relevant stakeholders.”
This new bureaucracy, according to Roguski, would “be empowered to analyze social media to identify misinformation and disinformation in order to counter it with their own propaganda.”
The WHO currently partners with numerous such organizations, such as “fact-checking” firm NewsGuard, for these purposes.
Roguski said the pandemic treaty also would speed up the approval process for drugs and injectables, provide support for gain-of-function research, develop a “Global Review Mechanism” to oversee national health systems, implement the concept of “One Health,” and increase funding for so-called “tabletop exercises” or “simulations.”
“One Health,” a brainchild of the WHO, is described as “an integrated, unifying approach to balance and optimize the health of people, animals and the environment” that “mobilizes multiple sectors, disciplines and communities” and “is particularly important to prevent, predict, detect, and respond to global health threats such as the COVID-19 pandemic.”
In turn, “tabletop exercises” and “simulations” such as “Event 201,” were remarkably prescient in “predicting” the COVID-19 and monkeypox outbreaks before they actually occurred.
Roguski said the pandemic treaty would provide a structure to redirect massive amounts of money “via crony capitalism to corporations that profit from the declarations of Public Health Emergencies of International Concern” (‘pandemics’) and “the fear-mongering that naturally follows such emergency declarations.”
Boyle warned that the treaty and proposed IHR regulations go even further. “The WHO, which is a rotten, corrupt, criminal, despicable organization, will be able to issue orders going down the pike to your primary care physician on how you should be treated in the event they proclaim a pandemic.”
Moreover, Boyle said, the pandemic treaty would be unlike many other international agreements in that it would come into immediate effect. He told The Defender:
“If you read the WHO Treaty, at the very end, it says quite clearly that it will come into effect immediately upon signature.
“That violates the normal processes for ratification of treaties internationally under the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, and also under the United States Constitution, requiring the United States Senate to give its advice and consent to the terms of the treaty by two-thirds vote.”
Indeed, Article 32 of the proposed treaty regarding its “Provisional application” states:
“The [treaty] may be applied provisionally by a Party that consents to its provisional application by so notifying the Depository in writing at the time of signature or deposit of its instrument of ratification, acceptance, approval, formal confirmation or accession.
“Such provisional application shall become effective from the date of receipt of the notification by the Secretary-General of the United Nations.”
“Whoever drafted that knew exactly what they were doing to bring it into force immediately upon signature,” said Boyle. “Assuming the World Health Assembly adopts the treaty in May, Biden can just order Fauci or whoever his representative is there to sign the treaty, and it will immediately come into effect on a provisional basis,” he added.
“I don’t know, in any of my extensive studies of international treaties, let alone treaties setting up international organizations, of any that has a provision like that in it,” said Boyle. “It’s completely insidious.”
Proposed amendments to IHR described as a WHO ‘power grab’
According to Roguski, who said the WHO is “attempting a power grab,” the proposed amendments to the IHR may be even more concerning than the pandemic treaty.
