What the UK Government doesn’t want us to know about the WHO Pandemic Treaty and IHR negotiations

In August, we asked the Government under FOI to reveal who is heading up the negotiation teams working on the WHO's Pandemic Preparedness Treaty and IHR Amendments. The response was surprising.

Five years ago when the Brexit negotiations were taking place, the Government published a biography of all of the lead civil servants involved in the process, presumably to reassure the public that complex issues were being dealt with at the most senior levels within the Government and by officials of eminent experience and expertise to negotiate in the UK’s best interests.

With the UK once again negotiating a set of international agreements with arguably equally long-term implications if not also now of comparable controversy, UsForThem asked the Foreign Office to disclose at what level within the Government the negotiations of the WHO Pandemic Treaty and amendments to the International Health Regulations are being handled.  The response was surprising.

Discussions ongoing, progress not clear

The October meeting of the World Health Assembly’s Working Group on Amendments to the International Health Regulations (WGIHR) in Geneva concluded with an acknowledgement that although it had been a hard week of productive negotiation the group remains some way off from an agreement.  Indeed that moment agreement appears now to be so far off that the deadline for agreeing the package of amendments has been extended from December 2023 to April/May 2024.  

This may be positive: the window of opportunity to dilute or excise completely the most objectionable proposals from the original package of amendments is now wider than expected; and we can assume agreement is proving more elusive than planned because at least some Member States are putting up a fight.

Beyond this, though, we know little of what was said or agreed in that meeting, or indeed in any of the previous four negotiation meetings.  For all that the WHO likes to talk of working in an inclusive manner, of stakeholder engagement, of openness and transparency, the public has not been permitted to know the current state of the negotiations.  Open democracy this is not.

The original suite of proposed amendments was published a year ago.  We know from the brief reports published after each plenary meeting that the negotiations have covered at least some of the most contentious proposals, though to what ends has remained unsaid and unwritten.  We know still less of what has happened in the so-called ‘intersessional work’ which takes place behind closed doors between the plenary gatherings in Geneva.  We should assume that many horses will already have been traded. 

Nothing to see here

Attempts by UsForThem and other groups, and by parliamentarians, to raise the profile and improve transparency around the negotiation of this inter-generationally significant update of public health architecture have met with unexpectedly determined resistance from the Government.  

In September we wrote to Steve Brine MP, Chair of the Health and Social Care Select Committee, to urge him to respond forcefully to the Health Secretary’s blatant attempt to deflect Parliament’s scrutiny.  The Committee had made measured requests for assurances and transparency around the Treaty and IHR negotiations; the response was evasive and disreputable.  We have yet to see whether the Committee will tolerate that brush-off.

Unfortunately though, as our earlier Substack on this topic recounted, despite the best efforts of a small handful of parliamentarians, most MPs have remained indifferent to the issues at stake and astonishingly comfortable to leave this critical negotiation to the expert officials.

So who are those expert officials shuttling to Geneva to negotiate these critical international agreements in the best interests of the UK, and how expert exactly are they?  It seems that too is a secret we are not permitted to know.

Top secret: safety not guaranteed

At the beginning of August, UsForThem used the Freedom of Information Act to ask the Government to reveal who is heading up each of the two UK negotiation teams working on the IHR Amendments and the parallel Pandemic Preparedness Treaty.  Anticipating that data protection laws might limit what could be revealed we said that we would be content just to know the job titles and departments of the lead negotiators so that we could at least understand at what level within Government this important process is being handled on the public’s behalf.  

After initially delaying its response, the FCDO responded eventually to say that it could confirm that the lead individuals are senior civil servants but it would not otherwise reveal further details on the grounds that it could be problematic under — you guessed it — data protection law, and because revealing further details could “put at risk the safety of individuals involved”.  

Yes, read that twice to be sure.  The Government has said that it cannot tell the UK public which senior civil servants are charged with negotiating these legally-binding, generationally-significant international accords on behalf of the UK, because revealing their involvement could put at risk their personal safety.  Quite why or how has not been explained; that too presumably is a secret.

The FOI exemption on which the Government has relied is intended to be used to resist disclosure of the identity of people involved in controversial areas such as animal experimentation or weapons research, or about intelligence agents and police informants; but it was surely never intended to keep hidden from the public the role of senior officials in a crucial but essentially bureaucratic negotiation process.  

So why the secrecy?  

The Government, and the WHO, might well argue that the details of intergovernmental negotiations need to be kept in relative privacy to facilitate a free and candid discussion of positions, and to avoid prejudicing the process of negotiation.  This perhaps explains why the detailed negotiation meetings in Geneva take place in closed sessions.  But it does not explain our Government’s apparent aversion to transparency and scrutiny around these negotiations.  If exposing Government process and decision-making to scrutiny and transparency is problematic, the issue is the decision-making, not the scrutiny and transparency.

The WGIHR has now agreed to produce an interim draft of the IHR amendments, for release at or shortly before the next meeting in December, so we may learn a little more in the coming weeks.  That draft might explain the extent of the negotiations that have taken place up to that point.  If so, it will be a positive development that just might reveal that our Government has fought hard to protect national autonomy over public spending and public health policies, and has resisted the expansionist ambitions of the WHO and its corporate sponsors.  

If that were the case, though, we might wonder why Ministers have not already taken the many opportunities passed over to date to provide that reassurance to Parliament and to the public, or indeed to claim some credit.  We do not feel optimistic.

There’s still time

We may hope that the updated draft version of the IHRs unveiled in December will show some improvement on the original proposals from 2022, but all of the evidence suggests it would be foolish to assume it.  There is still time for the UK to course-correct, but the window is closing.  So what can be done?  

In the face of the bewildering apathy of a majority of MPs, efforts must now be focussed on supporting the few parliamentarians willing to challenge the Government’s arrogant belief that the public should be kept in the dark.  Steve Brine MP and the Health Select Committee have a critical role to play here, but it is not clear that they have yet grasped the urgency of their task.  The Committee has the authority to call Ministers to account for their handling of the process and to call officials to explain the operational and public spending implications of the international obligations to which they together intend to commit the UK for generations to come.  

The collective energy of those of us in the UK who remain concerned about the corporate-backed WHO’s ambition to dominate global public health policy-making should now be directed — constructively and respectfully — at encouraging and supporting the few people left in a position to deliver that accountability.  On too many occasions our Parliament did not adequately hold Ministers and officials to account for their policies and decisions during the pandemic; it could begin to atone for that failure now.

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COMING SOON:

THE ACCOUNTABILITY DEFICIT, How ministers and officials evaded accountability, mislead the public and violated democracy during the pandemic, a forensic account of the devastating catalogue of failures of governance, government and ethics during the Covid pandemic, written by Molly, Arabella and Ben of UsForThem. 

More here: https://usforthem.co.uk/the-accountability-deficit/