The crunch is coming. Later this month, global health ministers will decide in Geneva whether to endorse the proposed new World Health Organisation (WHO) pandemic treaty.
This treaty actually stems from a British initiative by the then-prime minister Boris Johnson in March 2021. In a joint article with other leaders, he argued that the world needed a more coordinated approach to managing pandemics in future.
Sadly, since then the Government has never set out its actual negotiating objectives. This was a mistake.
When Iwas leading the Brexit negotiations, despite the chaos of the first wave of Covid, we still made sure that we published, in a public document, clear aims for our talks, because we knew that this would help sustain confidence when difficult moments arrived.
The failure to do this on the pandemic treaty has unfortunately created suspicion about what the Government is really trying to do and what it is willing to defend – all the more so as the conclusion approaches. That’s why the lead minister, Andrew Stephenson MP, was reluctantly forced to the House of Commons on Tuesday.
So are we right to be concerned? Yes – but not always for the reasons you will hear if you follow the debate on the treaty.
Some commentary is too alarmist. There isn’t a plot to impose vaccines and compel lockdowns. Indeed, the current draft makes clear that the WHO has no authority to alter domestic laws or “ban or accept travellers, impose vaccination mandates or therapeutic or diagnostic measures, or implement lockdowns”.
That is welcome. But it is also exactly why it is not reassuring when ministers say, as Stephenson did this week, that “this Government will only sign up to measures that respect our national sovereignty”. That’s not really in doubt. The risk lies elsewhere.
It lies in the actual point of the treaty: the creation of a new system ofpandemic management under the WHO authority and binding under international law.
The director general of the WHO, Dr Tedros, can declare theexistence of a pandemic. Member states take on an obligation to cooperate with the WHO “to the fullest extent possible”, to share information and “pandemic-related health products”, to establish a supply chain network, and much more – and of course to fund it. This is all new.
Now it is true that agreeing to this in a treaty does not give away British sovereignty. That’s because in our constitutional system treaties cannot change our domestic law unless Parliament specifically agrees – as it did on the EU exit treaties. Parliament can always refuse to implement an international legal obligation, and governments can always act contrary to international law.
How easy that is in practice – that is, not easy at all – we have discovered in the past few years. First with the UK Internal Market Bill, then the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill, and now with the Rwanda saga, the Government has either shied away from breaking international law or been blocked from doing so by its own backbenchers.
And that is the problem with this treaty, too. Our sovereignty is not formally affected, but we are taking on an international law obligation to work with the WHO system. When the next pandemic comes, government lawyers, MPs, and commentators will say “you must do what the WHO says, or you are breaking international law”.
A robust government can ignore this, but only if it doesn’t mind being called a “rogue state”. Consider all the opprobrium poured on Sweden during the pandemic. Can we really be confident that our ministers, of any party, would be as tough as they were?
This would matter less if we could be confident of the neutrality and competence of the WHO. In fact we can be confident of no such thing: it has a track record of incompetence, poor decision-making, and politicised conduct, not surprising considering the extent of China’s influence. Giving it a blank cheque is highly risky.
That is why we need the Government to show caution. Andrew Stephenson rightly said in Parliament that “the current text is not acceptable to us. Therefore, unless the current text is changed and refined, we will not be signing up to it.”
That current text is public. So, if the UK signs up anyway, we will be able to see what changed, and the Government can then come to Parliament and explain why it improved it. It must alsoprovide a proper vote in Parliament, a point on which it was very evasive this week.
But no foreseeable alterations will change the fact that we are taking on an open-ended international law obligation to work with the WHO. If it signs up, the Government must explain to Parliament how it intends to manage this. That won’t be straightforward – and in any case it is in all likelihood leaving these arrangements to a Labour administration, which will have very different concerns.
So it’s surely best to be cautious. This treaty has been rushed. Any text will be cobbled together and not properly thought through. Nothing requires us to sign it and nothing will happen if we don’t. Pause for thought, argue for a wider delay, think it through properly. And don’t sign till it’s right.
