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The WHO Pandemic Treaty is ‘Binding’ But it’s Not Enforceable

by Bruce Pardy
1 February 2024 11:03 AM

A new pandemic treaty is in the works. Countries are negotiating its terms, along with amendments to the International Health Regulations. If ready in time, the World Health Assembly will approve them in May. The deal may give the WHO power to declare global health emergencies. Countries will promise to follow WHO directives. Lockdowns, vaccine mandates, travel restrictions and more will be in the works. Critics say that the agreements will override national sovereignty because their provisions will be binding. But international law is the art of the Big Pretend.

You drive down Main Street. Cars are parked everywhere. The signs say “No Parking” but they also say, “The City does not enforce parking restrictions”. In effect there’s no rule against parking. Laws are commands imposed with the force of the state. Rules without sanctions are mere suggestions. Some people may honour the request, but others won’t. Those who disagree with the rule can safely ignore it. In domestic law, “enforceable” and “binding” are synonyms.

But not in international law, where promises are called ‘binding’ even if they are unenforceable. In the international sphere, countries are the highest authority. Nothing stands above them with the power to enforce their promises. No such courts exist. The International Court of Justice depends on the consent of the countries involved. No international police enforce its orders. The UN is a sprawling bureaucracy, but in the end, it is merely a place for countries to gather. The WHO is a branch of the UN whose mandate countries negotiate amongst themselves. 

In the proposed pandemic treaty, parties are to settle disputes through negotiation. They may agree to be subject to the International Court of Justice or to arbitration. But they cannot be required to. 

Yet international law jurists insist that unenforceable treaty promises can be binding. “The binding character of a norm does not depend on whether there is any court or tribunal with jurisdiction to apply it,” Daniel Bodansky, a Professor of International Law at Arizona State University, wrote in a 2016 analysis of the Paris climate agreement. “Enforcement is not a necessary condition for an instrument or norm to be legally binding.” Without this Big Pretend, international law would collapse like a house of cards on a windy beach.

All countries are sovereign. They are free to retaliate against each other for perceived wrongs, including breaches of treaty promises. They can seek to have other countries censured or expelled from the international regime. They can impose trade sanctions. They can expel ambassadors. But retaliation is not ‘enforcement’. Moreover, international relations are a delicate business. Aggrieved countries are more likely to express their disappointment in carefully crafted diplomatic language than to burn bridges.

The threat from WHO proposals come not from outside but from within. We live in a managerial age, run by a technocratic elite. Over time, they have acquired for themselves the discretion to direct society for the common good, as they declare it to be. 

As journalist David Samuels puts it:

Americans now find themselves living in an oligarchy administered day-to-day by institutional bureaucracies that move in lock-step with each other, enforcing a set of ideologically-driven top-down imperatives that seemingly change from week-to-week and cover nearly every subject under the sun.

These bureaucracies regulate, license, expropriate, subsidise, track, censor, prescribe, plan, incentivise and inspect. Pandemics and public health are the most recent justifications for yet more control. 

Domestic governments, not international bodies, will impose WHO recommendations on their citizens. They will pass laws and policies that incorporate those directives. Even an exasperated WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said so in a briefing this week:

There are those who claim that the pandemic agreement and [amended regulations] will cede sovereignty… and give the WHO Secretariat the power to impose lockdowns or vaccine mandates on countries… These claims are completely false… the agreement is negotiated by countries for countries and will be implemented in countries in accordance with your own national laws.

Ghebreyesus is correct. Local and national authorities will not give up their powers. To what extent international commitments will be ‘binding’ on a country depends not on international law but on that country’s own domestic laws and courts. Article VI of the U.S. Constitution, for example, provides that the Constitution, federal laws and treaties together “shall be the supreme Law of the Land”. That does not mean that treaties supersede the constitution or federal laws. Domestic legislation and policy will be required for the proposed pandemic treaty and WHO directives to be enforced on American soil. Such legislation is an exercise of sovereignty, not a repudiation of it. 

The proposals are not benign. Domestic authorities seek cover for their own autocratic measures. Their promises will be called ‘binding’ even though they are not. Local officials will justify restrictions by citing international obligations. Binding WHO recommendations leave them no choice, they will say. The WHO will coordinate their imperatives as the face of global public health.

The WHO is not taking over. Instead, it will be the handmaiden for a coordinated global biomedical state. Managers hate straight lines. Diffuse, discretionary powers avoid accountability and the rule of law. The global health regime will be a tangled web. It is meant to be.

Bruce Pardy is Executive Director of Rights Probe and Professor of Law at Queen’s University. This article was first published by the Brownstone Institute.

Tags: DemocracyGlobalismPandemic treatyUnited NationsUnited StatesWHO

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20 Comments
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Ron Smith
Ron Smith
8 months ago

Just wait until the pampered middle classes realise the true extent of the damage to the countryside and freedoms people like “Red Edd” are cooking up with Agenda 2030.

15
0
varmint
varmint
7 months ago
Reply to  Ron Smith

I suspect reality may come along sometime between now and 2030 and hit Miliband with an almighty uppercut. ——Reality is a very hard enemy to defeat, and I predict as Muhammad Alli used to do that Miliband and the phony planet savers in the Labour Party will fall in the third round

article-3096314-29089D9E00000578-569_636x581
2
0
Jack the dog
Jack the dog
8 months ago

There is no point in calling these wankers hypocrites.

The hypocrisy is part of the process, of rubbing our noses in it.

It is like the delicious steak dinners and private jets at Davos.

I can think of a solution but don’t want to seem to incite murderous violence on this wonderful site.

13
0
Jabby Mcstiff
Jabby Mcstiff
8 months ago

They aren’t completly lacking in self-consciousness so the will be aware of the hypocrisy. Some will justify it based on dubious utilitarian calculations. The greater good will be served. A problematic way of thinking but most are worse than that. They see themselves as a cut above. Subject to different rules and regulations and beyond good and evil. It’s a nice racket if you can get it. With the caveat that in order to be able to behave like this you have to be venal or stupid or both. The internal life of a hopelessly addicted masturbator.

6
0
Q
Q
8 months ago
Reply to  Jabby Mcstiff

Yes, the old ‘Greater Good’ theorem. Now a popular BA DisHons degree available at Cambridge, and other leading red-bricks.

2
0
huxleypiggles
huxleypiggles
8 months ago

“There is a level of hypocrisy: academics know that flying is bad for the environment,” said Professor Jonas De Vos of UCL, the lead author of the study. “But still, we often fly to international conferences, often to [make the argument] that society should be more sustainable.” “

Translation:

Even though we know we are all a set of hypocritical and lying Next Tuesdays we are still going to carry on with our jaunts. F. the plebs.

7
0
BS Whitworth
BS Whitworth
8 months ago

flying around “necessary to win promotions and funding” It’s all a scam.

9
0
psychedelia smith
psychedelia smith
8 months ago

Of course they do. They’re the new aristocracy and what they do and where they travel is of paramount importance. It’s the rioty little people in their stinky blue and yellow planes that need to be stopped.

5
0
Ron Smith
Ron Smith
8 months ago
Reply to  psychedelia smith

Yes the dirty people with tattoos that go to Spain and watch Football. We can’t have that!

4
0
Jabby Mcstiff
Jabby Mcstiff
8 months ago

I wouldn’t stress too much about this agenda. If you live in England then you can be rightly worried as the Brits are the prgenitors but if you look at the money it is being pulled out very quickly because those people know how to respond rapidly to changes in public sentiment. Look at the major car manufacturers. You will not see much new investment in ‘renewables’ because they know that people rightfully hate them in their current form. I garantee you that within 2 years the green agenda will be utterly destroyed. It won’t be a pleasant time and the insects won’t come back but at least we will be more concerned with serious issues. Unravelling the Great Poisoning will take several decades.

5
0
Ron Smith
Ron Smith
8 months ago
Reply to  Jabby Mcstiff

And the Reset!

3
0
Q
Q
8 months ago

“Four legs good, two legs bad.
Four legs good, two legs not such a bad idea.
Four legs best for you kafir, two legs for us.
Get back in your pen!”

  • Anon
4
0
Jabby Mcstiff
Jabby Mcstiff
8 months ago

Ideas of self-poisoning are very common at the end of empire. You can call them crisis cults. Any lapse in self-discipline can leave you open to ideas of self-abjection. We didn’t do anything bad to ourselves in the post-war era. In fact in terms of anti-imperialism we gave up our empire very quickly and civally. Regardless of your point of view the behaviouor the British after 1945 was exemplary and civil. And for a short while we had an independent system of science. Graham Greene was asked in 1962, what is wrong with the world. And he gave a one word answer – America.

3
0
Jabby Mcstiff
Jabby Mcstiff
8 months ago

The most important question arises when you ask yourself, what can I do to stop this hypocrisy or these flights? Very little because they have spent every year since 2008 in reinforcing their bunker. Acknowledgment of our current status is an important first step.

2
0
Finbar
Finbar
8 months ago

I am utterly shocked by this revelation….

4
0
anbak
anbak
8 months ago

As Jarvis Cocker once said, ‘Everyone hates a tourist’…. except when that tourist happens to be them!

3
0
soundofreason
soundofreason
8 months ago

On the website NoFlyClimateSci.org, several climate scientists explain why they have decided to cut down on flying for work. They include Dr. Lennart de Nooijer of the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research…

Who?

2
0
Richard Austin
Richard Austin
8 months ago

Global Warming was debunked years ago yet it still tips up now and again. Why do so many fools lie to themselves and others about all this stuff? Half an hour of research tells you all you need to know about this crap.
Climate Change certainly exists; there wouldn’t be a planet if it didn’t but man made is conceited and incredibly ignorant. Hopefully the bubble will burst before it is too late but I fear it will not.

5
0
varmint
varmint
7 months ago

Most of the politicians bureaucrats media pop stars and actors will not have the slightest clue about this issue. —–If we ask that plonker Lammy eg how much CO2 is in the atmosphere and how much is emitted by humans he likely won’t know. ——-“Climate Change” to all of these people (or most of them) is simply a concept. It is to them, without realising it, something that has been decided as fact elsewhere, and they don’t have to know about it. All they need to know is “Climate Change is real and happening now”. The details are not necessary. ———–Well actually the opposite is true. The details are absolutely necessary, and on closer inspection there are no details, or science that supports the idea of a “climate crisis”——Yet nearly every politician we see on TV and most media commentators brainwashed by the groupthink and supporting it for political purposes speak of “climate change” as if it were all ultimate truth —-IT ISN’T.

3
0
Kornea112
Kornea112
7 months ago

97% of climate scientists would be unemployed if there was no climate crisis. Their behavior is far worse than just hypocrisy. They are members participating in a cult like movement actively and knowingly destroying millions of people’s lives.

0
0
Lockdown Sceptic
Lockdown Sceptic
7 months ago

Flying Hypocrites Fly to Climate Events 

1
0

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