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To raise awareness of what constitutes an emergency and countries’ obligations, last month World Council for Health published a ‘Legal Brief on Preventing the Abuse of Public Health Emergencies’.

The document explains how governments used an unjustifiable state of emergency as a legal instrument to deny people basic human rights and freedoms and to grant themselves extraordinary powers.

The authors of the Legal Brief maintain that had people across the board been properly informed about the requirements of International Human Rights Law and the prerequisites necessary to declare a legitimate state of emergency, gross violations of fundamental human rights would not have been possible.

Many consider covid-19 to have been a worldwide “Trojan Horse” event that enabled human rights and freedoms to be trampled, dangerous medical interventions to be normalised and an unprecedented transfer of wealth to take place from ordinary people to the super-rich.

There is also deep concern that this was just a trial run and that the imminent promulgation of the World Health Organisation’s (“WHO’s”) “Pandemic Treaty” and amended International Health Regulations will take these tyrannical measures to an entirely different level.

The World Council for Health (“WCH”) has published a ‘Legal Brief on Preventing the Abuse of Public Health Emergencies’ in response to these concerns.

This document explains how governments used the declaration of an unjustifiable state of emergency as a legal instrument to deny people their basic human rights and freedoms and to grant themselves extraordinary powers.

The critical question that should have been addressed at the time was whether the threat posed by covid-19 represented a public health emergency that threatened the life of the nation. The Legal Brief presents four criteria to be used to determine if a state of emergency should be declared. These criteria state that the threat should:

• be actual or imminent;
• involve the whole nation;
• place the continuation of the organised life of society at risk of extinction; and,
• be so extraordinary that ordinary measures for protecting public health and order are clearly inadequate.

The arguments presented in this document show that the covid-19 event never met any of these criteria. Thus, as it did not meet the legal conditions of an emergency ‘threatening the life of a nation’, all derogation measures such as lockdowns, mask mandates, school and small business closures, travel restrictions, and harmful vaccine mandates, were illegal breaches of International Human Rights Law (“IHRL”).

All States have a legal obligation to enact public policy that protects, respects, and ensures fundamental human rights. Furthermore, certain norms and fundamental human rights exist that can never be violated, not even during a declared state of emergency. Instead, during the covid era, governments around the world chose to follow the recommendations of WHO, ignore the rights of citizens, and enact oppressive public health actions. It is also of huge concern that human rights organisations failed to hold governments to account for their abuse of emergency measures.

The authors of the Legal Brief maintain that had people across the board been properly informed about the requirements of IHRL and the prerequisites necessary to declare a legitimate state of emergency, these gross violations of fundamental human rights would not have been possible.

To prevent future public health emergencies resulting in similar human rights abuses, the Legal Brief therefore recommends the following actions:

• to educate the public regarding the criteria to declare a legitimate state of emergency;
• to establish panels to monitor adherence to IHRL and communicate violations; and,
• to establish activist groups to take necessary proactive legal action.

You can listen to Dr. Tess Lawrie explain this in the 5-minute video embedded in her Substack article.  You can read the Legal Brief HERE.