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Excerpts from:

Pandemic prevention, preparedness and response accord

24 February 2023 | Q&A

Member States of the World Health Organization have agreed to a global process to draft and negotiate a convention, agreement or other international instrument under the Constitution of the World Health Organization to strengthen pandemic prevention, preparedness and response.

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How much authority could an accord have over signatory countries? Will it be legally binding? Will it take sovereignty away from signatory countries?

The Zero Draft presented by the INB Bureau based on progress achieved and input received at the third meeting of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Body (INB) refers to a number of potential guiding principles and rights for the new accord, including the importance of national sovereign rights and full respect for the dignity, human rights and fundamental freedoms of persons.

As with all international instruments, any new accord, if and when agreed by Member States, would be determined by governments themselves, who would take any action while considering their own national laws and regulations.

Member States will decide the terms of the accord, including whether any of its provisions will be legally binding on Member States as a matter of international law.

It is expected that such an accord would aim to help prevent future disease outbreaks from impinging on people’s freedom to travel, work, seek education and, above all, lead a healthy life free of avoidable disease, as called for by another global accord, the WHO Constitution.

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Would the accord be open to all countries to join or participate in?

This would be a decision of WHO’s Member States, working through the intergovernmental negotiating body. It would be expected that a new accord would be open to the participation of all countries, who would be able to participate if they so wished. In line with the example provided by the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, the new accord could, possibly, be open to regional economic integration organizations.

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What could happen if countries that join or participate in any new accord do not meet their obligations?

It would be up to Member States to decide if and what compliance mechanisms would be included in the new accord on pandemic preparedness and response. It is a general principle of international law that once an international law instrument is in force, it would be binding on the parties to it, and would have to be performed by those parties in “good faith.”

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AP

WHO ‘pandemic treaty’ draft doesn’t sign over US sovereignty

By SOPHIA TULP
February 25, 2023

CLAIM: A legally-binding World Health Organization “pandemic treaty” will give the organization the authority to control U.S. policies during a pandemic, including those on vaccines, lockdowns, school closures and more.

AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. The voluntary treaty, which is in draft form and is still far away from ratification, does not overrule any nation’s ability to pass individual pandemic-related policies, multiple experts, including one involved in the draft process, told The Associated Press. The treaty lays out broad recommendations related to international cooperation on pandemic prevention, preparedness and response. Nowhere in the 30-page document are lockdowns, closures or specific citizen surveillance systems mentioned.

THE FACTS: As the WHO meets on Monday to discuss the first draft of the treaty, social media users are misrepresenting the scope of the document to suggest signing onto it would cede U.S. rights to the international body.

“Biden is about to give the China-controlled W.H.O. power to control the United States. This will cover lockdowns, supply chains, surveillance, and ‘false news’,” claimed one Instagram post referring to the treaty draft.

Conservative blogs and commentators also shared misleading information about what kind of actions the treaty would trigger.

“The Biden administration is in the process of finalizing a deal that would give the WHO near-total authority to dictate America’s policies during a pandemic,” read the caption of an Instagram post by The Epoch Times, which continued: “This includes vaccine policies, lockdown policies, school closure policies, the contact tracing of U.S. citizens, and even the monitoring of online speech if that speech goes against the official narrative.”

But this interpretation of what the treaty would do is incorrect, multiple experts agree.

“These claims are utterly false,” said Lawrence Gostin, a Georgetown University law professor and director of the university’s WHO Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law. He’s been involved in the treaty’s draft process.

“The United States retains sovereignty to set its own domestic public health policies,” he added. “WHO does not gain any power to override domestic policy decisions.”
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“It is false to claim that the World Health Organization has now, or will have by virtue of these activities, any authority to direct U.S. health policy or national health emergency response actions,” the agency wrote. “The WHO has no such enforcement mechanisms, and its non-binding recommendations to member states are just that: non-binding. Any associated actions at the national level will remain reserved to sovereign states, including the United States.”

In fact, the first line of the draft states: “Reaffirming the principle of sovereignty of States Parties in addressing public health matters, notably pandemic prevention, preparedness, response and health systems recovery.”

And a separate section of the draft labeled “Sovereignty” clearly says that states have “the sovereign right to determine and manage their approach to public health, notably pandemic prevention, preparedness, response and recovery of health systems, pursuant to their own policies and legislation, provided that activities within their jurisdiction or control do not cause damage to their peoples and other countries.”

Nowhere in the 30-page document are the words lockdown, closures, contact tracing or online speech mentioned, nor are mentions of specific citizen surveillance systems.

Further, while the treaty, if ratified, would be considered a legally-binding document, there are effectively no legal consequences for signatories who fail to adhere to it or violate its terms, experts said. The WHO has no enforcement power to levy consequences over the document, other than largely symbolic actions akin to an international “slap on the wrist,” said Dr. David Freedman, professor emeritus of infectious diseases at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, who also served on a separate WHO committee of experts for a decade.

Read the rest:

https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-world-health-organization-pandemic-treaty-212446302001

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