Urgent call for Ireland to fight WHO ‘takeover’

A referendum must be put to the Irish people before the unelected World Health Organisation (WHO) can be allowed to hijack Ireland’s sovereignty and ability to decide its own policies on matters of public, animal and plant health, water, energy, air, food, climate change, sustainable development and anything else with potential impact on public health, says the Irish Council for Human Rights (ICHR).

‘All of these decisions, and many more, will be centralised in the WHO and this will absolutely remove any meaningful notion of what it means to be free,’ the ICHR warns.

In a statement released on January 7, 2024, it says such delegation of authority to the WHO, under its proposed new international health regulations (IHR) and ‘pandemic treaty’, at least in an Irish context, will be found to be unconstitutional unless a referendum is put to the people.

Regardless of whether or not a court finds that a referendum must be held, the ICHR states, there can be little denying that the WHO is seeking to significantly expand its power, such that it would have the legal authority take over every possible aspect of people’s lives, such as:

* how many vaccines and boosters you must take to participate in society. * whether you are allowed to eat meat or not. * the mode of transport you can use and how far you can travel. * whether you are allowed to use oil, turf or coal to keep warm during the winter. * what source of energy you can use. * how many cows you can keep on your own land or whether you are allowed to keep animals at all.

‘As regards political accountability,’ says the ICHR, ‘given that the WHO are not elected by the people, they are not accountable to the people — and as we have heard our politicians utter countless times with regards to immigration, “we have international obligations” — the very same excuse will be used to free politicians from any responsibility as regards decisions made by the WHO if the pandemic treaty or proposed amendments to the IHR are passed, regardless of how those decisions impact on the people of any particular country.

‘If the people of any particular country can no longer make their own laws, they can no longer be called sovereign.’

The ICHR believes that the Irish government will agree, in principle, to be bound by the pandemic treaty and amendments to the IHR but that, thereafter, it will put the matter to a referendum. Irish people are thus urged to start lobbying their TDs and Senators now and ask them to vote ‘No’ in May, 2024, and to begin educating family and friends about the dangers that lie ahead should they vote ‘Yes’ if or when the referendum takes place.

But Ireland’s Minister of Health, Stephen Donnelly, has already ‘reaffirmed Ireland’s commitment to progressing the development of an international treaty aimed at strengthening pandemic prevention, preparedness and response in the wake of the covid-19 pandemic’ (Department of Health press release, December 18, 2023).

This followed a meeting in Dublin between Ireland’s health ministers and the WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO executive director for emergencies Dr Mike Ryan, and WHO technical officer Dr Cindi Lewis, after which it was revealed that Ireland’s assessed contributions to the WHO would rise from €1.5 million in 2023 to a target level of €3.7 million from 2024, well ahead of a 2029 deadline.

The ICHR points out that two separate but interconnected and crucial events are now taking place at the WHO.

The first is the drafting and negotiation of the pandemic response treaty, noting that to date there have been two drafts of this treaty published, the first was on February 1, 2023, and the second on October 30, 2023. The draft of the treaty currently under review is the latter version and the body carrying out the drafting and negotiation of the treaty is the intergovernmental negotiating body (INB).

The second event is the negotiation of amendments to the IHR of 2005. A body called the review committee was established to collate amendments proposed by state parties, noting that these have proposed more than 300 amendments to the regulations, as part of this process, to date. The review committee has published one report, on February 6, 2023, which includes both its commentary on the proposed amendments and also a record of all proposed amendments.

It’s intended that countries will vote on both the passage of the pandemic treaty and the proposed IHR amendments at the next World Health Assembly (WHA) meeting in May, 2024 — so less than five months now until these critical votes take place.

In essence, says the ICHR, if either the pandemic treaty or the proposed amendments to the IHR are passed, independent sovereign countries, like Ireland, will have relinquished their electorally mandated authority to a singular governing body, the WHO, to implement legally binding orders, both during and outside of pandemics, at national, regional and international level.

It is important to note that the INB and the review committee continue to work together to ensure harmony between the final versions of the pandemic treaty and amendments to the IHR, such that there is considerable overlap and repetition between the two documents, meaning that if the vote on the treaty were to pass but the vote on the amendments were to fail, or vice versa, the outcome would still be detrimental in terms of a loss of individual freedom, political accountability and state sovereignty.

For this reason, attention should be focused on ensuring that both of these events fail, as opposed to focusing on just one of them. Also, it should be noted that the INB and the review committee meet in public sessions, and agendas, working documents and reports are publicly available, but that they also meet in private sessions and the general public are not entitled to view the records of these meetings.

‘Given the very serious consequences that are likely to flow from yes votes to either the pandemic treaty or proposed amendments to the IHR, it seems astonishing that any meetings would be held in secret session, the only logical conclusion being that there are matters being discussed that neither the INB nor the review committee want the general public to aware of,’ the ICH asserts.

There are currently 195 recognised independent sovereign states in the world, 193 of which are members of the United Nations, while the remaining two states are referred to as non-member observer states. The WHO can be referred to as the Department of Health of the UN, given that the UN states that the WHO is the ‘directing and coordinating authority on international health within the UN system’.

The ICHR adds: ‘Given that the vast majority of recognised sovereign states are members of the UN/WHO/WHA, it is reasonable to conclude that authority for global public health (but not just public health) is going to be centralised in one governing body, namely the WHO, if either the pandemic treaty or the proposed amendments to the IHR are passed.’

• See also my article of January, 2023: ‘Alarm over WHO global ‘power grab’.
• The ICHR has prepared two videos explaining these issues. A summarised version can be viewed here:

• A comprehensive review of all information needed to be fully informed can be viewed here:

*****

You can subscribe to Medium by using this link: