The UK must opt out of the WHO’s new international health regulations (IHRs) by July 19th to avoid the body co-ordinating the response to any future Covid-style pandemic.
In a letter to the Foreign Office, 14 leading Parliamentarians urge the Government to exercise Britain’s right to ignore amendments to the regulations before the looming deadline.
The IHRs were drawn up by member states of the WHO in the aftermath of the Covid pandemic, and increase the organisation’s powers to co-ordinate future global responses to pandemics.
But critics have warned they give too much power to the WHO and risk undermining individual countries’ right to manage their own affairs.
The regulations say WHO member states must “support WHO-coordinated response activities”, which critics argue could amount to an obligation to support the body’s recommendation to lock down in a future pandemic.
A Government spokesman told the Telegraph “no decision” had yet been made on which of the amendments were in the “national interest”.
Writing for the Telegraph, Suella Braverman, a former home secretary, warned that the regulations “present the most serious threat to national sovereignty in a generation”.
She wrote: “What the British public sees – what they intuit – is not just bureaucratic overreach but a creeping usurpation of their democratic rights. They voted to leave the European Union precisely because they were tired of decisions being made by people they could not name and could not remove. The WHO, as it currently stands, is another iteration of the same problem.”
A WHO spokesman said the body “does not have the right or ability to take any decision concerning health within a sovereign state,” adding: “Such authority will and always remain with the countries themselves....<<<Read More>>>...
