The World Health Organization has announced plans to punish so-called ‘conspiracy theorists’ by stripping the human rights of anyone who spreads ‘disinformation’ about them on the internet.
The United Nations health agency recently released the zero draft of its international treaty on the pandemic.
The deal will give the unelected global body new powers to “crack down” on anything it deems to be “false, misleading, untrue or misinformation”.
The WHO will essentially gain new legally binding censorship powers if this treaty passes.
The Agency for Health advocates for the adoption of an agreement from December 2021.
Those drafting the treaty intend to present a final report to the World Health Assembly (WHA), the WHO’s decision-making body, in May 2024.
If adopted, the treaty will be legally binding under international law.
The 194 member states of the WHO (representing 98% of all countries in the world) will be required to comply with the requirements of the treaty to combat “disinformation”.
The zero draft is similar to previous versions of the treaty, and provisions related to disinformation are described in Article 17 (“Strengthening Pandemic and Public Health Literacy”).
This section of the treaty calls on member states to “combat false, misleading disinformation, including by promoting international cooperation”.
It also calls on member states to manage “infodemics”.
The term was coined by the WHO and refers to “too much information, including false or misleading information in the digital and physical environment during a disease outbreak.”
Specifically, member states are told to manage these so-called infodemics “through effective channels, including social media”.
The scope of this treaty also extends beyond WHO’s membership base.
Article 16 (“Whole-of-government and whole-of-society approach at the national level”) encourages member states to cooperate with non-state actors and the private sector as part of a “whole-of-society response in decision-making, implementation, monitoring and evaluation, as well as effective feedback mechanisms.” “
As with any attempt to censor content deemed misinformation, this pandemic treaty raises questions about how these so-called authorities will decide what misinformation is.
Experts are now beginning to admit that many of the claims that the authorities once pushed as true, such as the claim that Covid vaccines will prevent infection, are false.
And these questions are particularly relevant in this case because the WHO is famous for its erroneous tweet during the early stages of the pandemic that reinforced the claims of the Chinese authorities that “there is no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the coronavirus.”
The WHO released this zero draft of the international treaty on the pandemic during its 152nd meeting of the executive board which started on 30 January and will end on 7 February.
The International Pandemic Agreement will be adopted under Article 19 of the WHO Constitution if adopted.
This article allows the WHA to impose legally binding conventions on WHO member states by a two-thirds majority vote.
Usually, elected officials vote on laws that apply to their country, but in this WHO law-making process, a handful of global representatives decide on rules that apply to all countries.
Regardless of whether a third of WHO member states vote against the international agreement on the pandemic, it will continue to apply to their countries under international law.
In addition to limiting the power of politicians to decide the laws that apply to their country, this process also limits the ability of citizens to hold politicians accountable at the ballot box.
Representatives of WHO member countries are mostly unelected diplomats who remain in their positions regardless of changes in government.
And the majority of votes that determine whether international law will apply to a particular country are cast by representatives of other nations.
The international agreement on the pandemic has the support of many democratic countries, including the United States (US), the United Kingdom (UK), Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
It also includes the European Council (EC) which represents the 27 member states of the European Union (EU).
These countries support it despite the undemocratic process of adopting the WHO law.
The release of this zero-draft international treaty on the pandemic comes days after the WHO said it needed to tackle misinformation.
The WHO also recently shared a video stating that “anti-vaccination activism” is deadlier than “global terrorism”.
