The UN Secretariat held its Summit of the Future at its headquarters in New York this week, on September 22nd-23rd. Few could number the many global summits that have been held across this nebulous grouping of entities, programmes and funds, although a list of the major ones may be found. They all focus on the noblest causes such as human rights, the environment, education, sustainable development, children and indigenous people that no one can easily oppose.

These gatherings give professional politicians an opportunity to make declarations in front of the iconic blue and white peace flag, astutely posing for pictures for their domestic cover pages. International and national staff take advantage of business class travel and fancy hotels on taxpayers’ money, justifying again their irreplaceable jobs, comfortable salaries and perks. Journalists tell us how they all feel inspired and moved by the new agenda and how sincere these promises are. Pre-approved non-governmental organisations (NGOs), frequently led by former politicians and espousing humanitarian missions in concert with the international aid they parasitise move in to shake hands with the big boys and applaud the system.

All is beautifully scripted, staged and acted. This is the ever-growing UN industrial complex.

Only ‘We The Peoples’ are not there.

Once built on the premise of improving human lives, rights and livelihoods, the system has become a cause unto itself, repeating the same empty messages and hypocritical promises over and over again, and always expanding. There are always compelling reasons to spend the money of others.

A system self-proclaimed for ‘The Peoples’

The UN Charter, signed on June 26th 1945 in San Francisco in the aftermath of the Second World War began with the first famous words inspired by the 1787 U.S. Constitution for an international context: “We The Peoples of the United Nations…”. These are the words from which the UN system draws its legitimacy based on the principle that those elected by or representing ‘The Peoples’ make decisions on their behalf. Article 55 affirms the role of the organs to be created.

Article 55 (UN Charter)

With a view to the creation of conditions of stability and well-being which are necessary for peaceful and friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples, the United Nations shall promote:

– higher standards of living, full employment and conditions of economic and social progress and development;

– solutions of international economic, social, health and related problems; and international cultural and educational cooperation; and

– universal respect for, and observance of, human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion.

However, unlike the American Founding Fathers who immediately chose to guarantee inalienable and fundamental rights of their citizens in the first set of amendments agreed in 1791 (known as the Bill of Rights), the UN’s founders merely achieved in 1948 a symbolic Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) without binding force, although it later inspired key international and regional human rights treaties.

A major provision, Article 19(2), is often overlooked, despite its profound impact on the interpretation of all other provisions recognising fundamental rights based on the circumstances where human rights may be limited. The second paragraph (highlighted below) allows limitations made to human rights and freedoms by authorities for the sake of preserving “morality, public order and the general welfare”.

Article 29 (UDHR)

1. Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible.

2. In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.

3, These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.

The third provision here is where the UDHR and the U.S. Bill of Rights diverge most fundamentally. Whilst the purpose of the U.S. Bill of Rights was to stop a tyrannical government from overriding the will of the people, the UDHR specifically states that the UN, in its increasing determination to centralise authority within itself, can do so. After laying out the fundamental principles that humans are equal and of equal worth, they could not bring themselves to leave it there, but needed to ensure that some were more equal than others.

Human history has shown that it is effortless for any government to claim that restrictive laws meet requirements for “general welfare” and the greater good, especially in situations deemed by those in power to be endangering public order. The COVID-19 experience has shown that emergency measures are far more readily imposed than they are withdrawn, and ‘the People’s’ desire for fundamental rights and freedoms may be limited by irrational fear spread by those in power. This is exactly why constitutions should prevent such abuse, rather than justify it.

Two weeks for the UN to flatten human rights

The UN system is led by the highest servant of ‘The Peoples’ – the Secretary-General (UNSG). According to UNSG’s own website, “the Secretary-General is a symbol of United Nations ideals and a spokesperson for the interests of the world’s peoples, in particular the poor and vulnerable among them”. This official is expected to “uphold the values and moral authority of the UN” even at the risk of challenging some member states.

On February 24th 2020, human rights were still proclaimed at the centre of the system. At a press conference at the WHO’s headquarters in Geneva, UNSG Antonio Guterres urged that “all countries must do everything, respecting naturally the principle of non-discrimination, without stigmatisation, respecting human rights – but doing everything that they can to contain the disease”. While “doing everything they can” implicitly put the importance of the disease above human rights concerns, at least these rated a prominent mention.

On March 11th 2020, the WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic.

On March 19th 2020, at a virtual press conference, UNSG sent out his blessing to any exceptional measure to be taken since the world was “at war with the virus”:

My central message is clear: We are in an unprecedented situation and the normal rules no longer apply. We cannot resort to the usual tools in such unusual times.

Nevertheless, he still made a verbal effort to uphold his mandate: “We must recognize that the poorest and most vulnerable — especially women — will be the hardest hit.” But recognition, of course, is not respect or protection. His statement was alarming in that he, and anyone paying attention, already knew that the vast majority of the world’s population were at minimal or no risk, and only the sick or elderly were shown to be likely to suffer from the virus directly. However, the impact of the unusual response on human rights and on increasing poverty and inequality were also expected.

On March 26th 2020, Guterres encouraged states to shut down completely until a vaccine came.

Allow me to highlight three critical areas for concerted G-20 action.

First, to suppress the transmission of COVID-19 as quickly as possible.

That must be our common strategy.

It requires a coordinated G-20 response mechanism guided by WHO.

All countries must be able to combine systematic testing, tracing, quarantining and treatment with restrictions on movement and contact – aiming to suppress transmission of the virus.

And they have to coordinate the exit strategy to keep it suppressed until a vaccine becomes available.

Was Guterres a real spokesperson for the poorest and the most vulnerable, those who were most disadvantaged by restrictive measures? No, he wasn’t. He never invited states to review their emergency measures.

One month later, on April 27th 2020, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), headquartered in Palais Wilson, Geneva, not far from the World Health Organisation (WHO), released its guidance on ‘Emergency measures and COVID-19‘. It validated the restrictive measures “for public health reasons”, encouraging rather than questioning the removal of the basic rights the organisation was once assumed to uphold, and listed the following six requirements for emergency measures:

– Legality: The restriction must be ‘provided by law’. This means that the limitation must be contained in a national law of general application, which is in force at the time the limitation is applied. The law must not be arbitrary or unreasonable, and it must be clear and accessible to the public.

– Necessity: The restriction must be necessary for the protection of one of the permissible grounds stated in the 1966 International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights, which include public health, and must respond to a pressing social need.

– Proportionality: The restriction must be proportionate to the interest at stake, and be the least intrusive option among those that might achieve the desired result.

– Non-discrimination: No restriction shall discriminate contrary to the provisions of international human rights law.

– All limitations should be interpreted strictly and in favour of the right at issue. No limitation can be applied in an arbitrary manner.

– The authorities have the burden of justifying restrictions upon rights.

In addition, emergency legislation and measures taken must be: i) “strictly temporary in scope”; ii) “the least intrusive to achieve the stated public health goals”, and iii) “including safeguards such as review clauses, in order to ensure return to ordinary laws as soon as the emergency situation is over”.

No follow-up actions were taken by the UN regarding the consideration of this guidance.

‘We The Peoples’ have learned a hard lesson: our lives and rights were not the reason for the UN, but subject to it and its wealthy and powerful partners.

Remarkably, less than a year later, in February 2021, Guterres wrote an article in the Guardian newspaper to condemn the “pandemic of human rights abuses”. He conveniently did not mention the complicity of the UN system in aiding, abetting and promoting lockdowns. He completely failed to include any self-assessment of whether his public actions (speeches) and inactions, or those of his organisation, contributed to this unprecedented and protracted abuse on a global scale.

An irrational panic to kill the individual right to bodily autonomy

Following Guterres’s example, OHCHR did not defend the fundamental right to refuse vaccines, as one would assume its mandate demanded.

On December 17th 2020, the office released its statements on ‘Human Rights and COVID-19 vaccines‘. Amazingly, it proposed to recognise these vaccines as “global public goods” and called for their equitable distribution and affordable price. Nowhere in the document was mentioned the right for anyone to elect not to be injected, as the basis of international human rights agreements, such as the Nuremberg Code would seem to demand.

Nuremberg Code

1. The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, overreaching or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion, and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision.

OHCHR’s inadequate understanding of human rights was not a mistake. It persisted and signed. On December 8th 2021, by a video message addressed to the Human Rights Council, its chief, Human Rights Commissioner Michelle Bachelet, stated (at 5’30”) that “any mandatory vaccination regime needs flexibilities for appropriate exceptions”, but that “it may be acceptable to condition the exercise of certain other rights and liberties – such as access to schools, hospitals or other public, or publicly accessible, spaces – on vaccination”.

Although Bachelet recognised that forced injections were not acceptable (“in no circumstances should people be forcibly administered a vaccine”), she was perfectly happy to restrict what are considered basic human rights under the UDHR, including that of education and participation in society. It was extremely strange that she did not define what was forced vaccination. Vast numbers of people on earth took the vaccines because they were threatened of losing jobs, or losing the right to see family members, attend schools, reopen their business, or even to receive medical treatment. Surely must this amount to forced injections within any reasonable assessment of human need.

Bachelet further stated that appropriate fines could be part of legal consequences for refuseniks. Her flawed arguments were probably based on the so-called ‘greater good’ approach of COVID-19, widely associated in the past with fascist and other totalitarian regimes. Such measures were falsely promoted through the WHO’s propagandistic slogan “no one is safe until everyone is safe”, referred to in her speech.

It is dumbfounding that, for Bachelet – a physician by training (Humboldt University of Berlin) and once Chile’s Minister of Health, then President – vaccine mandates did not violate human rights principles. Didn’t she know about the Nuremberg Code developed so near her place of learning, that codifies 10 principles of individual autonomy and the absolute principle of voluntary consent for medical experiments and treatments? (And yes, the mRNA vaccines were still experimental, but informed consent is also basic to all medical ethics.)

Didn’t she know that the UDHR also put the individual first before any greater good, and that there is no community good that doesn’t allow a free and full development of an individual’s personality?

Article 29 (UDHR)

1. Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible.

These two texts, the Nuremberg Code and UDHR – though of non-binding nature, codifying the highest ethical and moral values of our societies – were developed after World War II to protect individuals at the mercy of authorities who, very often, have the monopoly of violence, control and punishment, while telling their populations to sacrifice for the community’s ‘greater good’.

Conclusion

The enormous harms to fundamental rights and freedoms of the voiceless billions have been fast buried, while the UN machinery continues its business-as-usual – this time with an ‘agenda for the future’ initiated by the same Guterres. While proposing three non-binding documents (‘Pact for the Future’, ‘Declaration for Future Generations’ and ‘Global Digital Compact’), the UN plans to expand its mandate and funding to advise and lead on every issue, including the “needs and interests of future generations” and “artificial intelligence”. It claims to be the only competent and legitimate authority to prevent and manage the eventual “complex global shocks”, meaning crises beyond one single state’s border and capacity. However, without serious and independent assessments of the outrageous Covid response, and without recognition of the UN’s technical, advisory and moral failures, any agenda should be assumed to be intended to serve the same authoritarian – and for the UN’s partners, very profitable – aims.

These documents likely will be adopted by the same political leaders who are yet to face inquiries for riding roughshod over the fundamental rights and freedoms of their own populations.

The UN machinery has grown too old and detached to remember ‘The Peoples’ it is supposed to serve. Worse, it continues to betray its own purposes and principles. It has become a self-serving system. It doesn’t care if ‘We The Peoples’ ignore its Summit, oppose or embrace it. We are not supposed to be part of the process, just its subjects as it forges a world in the image of those we once thought we had defeated.