Author Topic: The United Nations/ US Sovereignty/International Law  (Read 148511 times)

DougMacG

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United Nations, WHO: Yes, Dr Tedros previously covered up epidemics
« Reply #300 on: May 18, 2020, 11:11:26 PM »
Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/13/health/candidate-who-director-general-ethiopia-cholera-outbreaks.html

[2017]  “A leading candidate to head the World Health Organization was accused this week of covering up three cholera epidemics in his home country, Ethiopia, when he was health minister — a charge that could seriously undermine his campaign to run the agency. The accusation against Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus was made by a prominent global health expert who is also an informal adviser to Dr. David Nabarro, a rival candidate in the race for W.H.O. director general.”
« Last Edit: May 19, 2020, 05:47:06 AM by DougMacG »

Crafty_Dog

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WSJ: Trump vs ICC
« Reply #301 on: June 12, 2020, 05:45:17 AM »
Warning a Rogue Court
A Trump order defends the U.S. and Israel against foreign prosecutors.
By The Editorial Board
June 11, 2020 7:46 pm ET
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The International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands.
PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES
President Trump takes a lot of flak for his blunderbuss hostility to international organizations, but he’s aiming for the right target with the new sanctions he threatened Thursday against the International Criminal Court. Someone needs to rein in the ICC and it might as well be Washington.

The order allows the Justice, State and Treasury departments to impose financial sanctions or travel bans on any ICC officials who attempt to prosecute Americans. It expands on a previous round of travel restrictions on some ICC officials introduced last year. The immediate goal is to block an investigation the ICC started in 2017 into supposed war crimes in Afghanistan. That investigation is both vexatious and silly. U.S. officials accused of crimes already are subject to American law, while the ICC somehow thinks the Taliban will care if officials in the Hague prosecute the terrorists for genocide.

The bigger aim of Thursday’s sanctions is to defend American sovereignty, and that of allies such as Israel that are also targeted by the court. The U.S. is not a party to the ICC, and both Republican and Democratic administrations have long worried the court would expose American officials to politicized lawfare investigations.

Sure enough, Attorney General William Barr said Thursday the Administration believes Russia may be exerting undue influence on the court to tie down American officials in a long, costly and pointless Afghanistan prosecution. Mr. Barr also said he’s seen evidence of financial improprieties by court officials. If that’s true, the lack of effective accountability counts as another strike against the court’s legitimacy.

The Trump Administration would perform a public service by releasing whatever evidence it has of alleged wrongdoing at the court. Meanwhile, Mr. Trump’s order is a vital defense of the constitutional rights of American citizens to have criminal complaints against them adjudicated in impartial, democratically legitimate courts.

Crafty_Dog

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Globalist Joe at the UN
« Reply #306 on: February 08, 2021, 05:31:54 PM »
Hope Over Experience at the U.N.
Biden ‘reengages’ with a dictators’ club called the Human Rights Council.
By The Editorial Board
Feb. 8, 2021 6:42 pm ET



Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Monday announced the U.S. would rejoin the United Nations Human Rights Council, vowing to reform the body “so it can achieve its potential.” We suggest the White House aim for a more realistic goal—like attaining world peace or establishing a self-sustaining Martian colony.

The U.S. is joining the council as an observer immediately and will seek full membership when possible. It shouldn’t be hard to meet the organization’s expectations. Well over half of its members “fail to meet the minimal standards of a free democracy,” according to UN Watch.

Last fall Cuba, Russia and China were elected to the 47-seat body. Moscow won its seat after poisoning opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who has since been imprisoned on trumped-up charges. The Chinese Communist Party-sponsored genocide in Xinjiang wasn’t enough to stop its accession, though its margin of victory narrowed from previous years. Cuba’s long history of repression didn’t matter.


Like so many other U.N. institutions, the council also has a malign obsession with Israel. It has condemned the Jewish state some 90 times since its founding in 2006. No other country comes close. By UN Watch’s count, Syria and North Korea earned 13 and 35 condemnations. Russia and China? Zero.



Mr. Blinken at least acknowledged “that the Human Rights Council is a flawed body, in need of reform to its agenda, membership, and focus, including its disproportionate focus on Israel.” But these problems are endemic and predictable: Membership is based on a vote in the General Assembly, not on real standards of human dignity or freedom.

Knowing that Norway and North Korea get an equal say, George W. Bush didn’t bother seeking a seat. Then Barack Obama joined with no real results. After the Trump Administration’s attempts at reform failed, the U.S. withdrew.

Mr. Blinken argues “our withdrawal in June 2018 did nothing to encourage meaningful change, but instead created a vacuum of U.S. leadership, which countries with authoritarian agendas have used to their advantage.” This might be credible if countries like Cuba, China and Russia also weren’t members during the Obama years. Mr. Blinken doesn’t explain why this time is different.

A leading conceit of Joe Biden’s foreign policy is that the U.S. can reform international organizations—and make them live up to their ostensibly noble purposes—simply by showing up. History shows that America’s involvement condones the farce rather than ending it.

Crafty_Dog

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Stratfor: How many countries are there in the world?
« Reply #307 on: March 03, 2021, 05:00:01 AM »
How Many Countries Are There in the World?

undefined and Director of Analytic Client Solutions
Amelia Harnagel
Director of Analytic Client Solutions, Stratfor
4 MIN READMar 2, 2021 | 22:22 GMT





People stand over a world map at the Monument to the Discoveries in the Belem parish of Lisbon, Portugal, on Aug. 21, 2014.
People stand over a world map at the Monument to the Discoveries in the Belem parish of Lisbon, Portugal, on Aug. 21, 2014.
(Frederic Soltan/Corbis via Getty Images)

How many countries are there in the world? It’s a seemingly simple question. But like so many things in geopolitics, the answer is, well...complicated.

The 1933 Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States listed four requirements for statehood: a permanent population, a defined territory, a government and the capacity to enter into relations with other states. The issue, however, is defining who meets that criteria, which varies depending on who you ask.

The Common Standards
United Nations: Since the middle of the 20th century, U.N. membership has largely been seen as the standard for what makes a country a country. South Sudan was the last new member to join the United Nations in 2011, bringing the total number of U.N. member-states (and some would say recognized countries) to 193.

Admission of new members is managed by the U.N. Secretary-General with approval from the General Assembly, based on whether the applicant is deemed a “peace-loving” state that is “able and willing to carry out the obligations contained in the [U.N.] Charter.”
The United Nations also allows for non-member states to serve as “permanent observers” in the General Assembly, which currently includes The Holy See (commonly known as Vatican City) and the Palestinian territories.
Nation-State vs. Country
For the purposes of this analysis, we’ve opted to stick with the common vernacular that uses “nation-state” and “country”  interchangeably. Technically, however, there’s a difference. The United Kingdom, for example, is a single nation-state made up of four countries. And while a country, Libya is not a formal nation-state since it currently lacks a unified government that’s recognized both at home and abroad. 

The World Bank: Another large global body that we reference often in our work here at Stratfor is the World Bank. While World Bank and U.N. membership overlaps significantly, they have different missions and different criteria for admission. Andorra, Cuba, Liechtenstein, Monaco and North Korea are U.N. members but not World Bank members, whereas Kosovo is a World Bank member but not a U.N. member.

The Olympics: Of course, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) is another large international organization with a global membership and reach. The number of countries competing changes slightly each time the events are held, as well as between the summer and winter games. But for our purposes here, we’ll consider the 2016 Summer Olympics, which saw athletes from a whopping 205 countries compete. This included all 193 U.N. countries except Kuwait (whose athletes competed under the banner of Independent Olympic Athletes), along with 12 other countries.


The Gray Areas
It is worth noting that there are dozens of areas around the world that are not formal members of these international organizations, but meet the 1933 criteria for statehood listed above (i.e. permanent population, defined borders, a government and capacity for international relations). This includes:

Self-proclaimed states like Liberland, located between Croatia and Serbia.
Partially recognized states like Western Sahara and Northern Cyprus.
Politically ambiguous states like Palestine and Taiwan, which are both recognized by some U.N. member states and not others.
“De-facto” states like Donetsk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine, which operate mostly independently but are still widely recognized as part of another nation-state. Other breakaway territories that fall into this category include Somaliland, Tibet, Abkhazia and Transnistria.
Our Definition

As for our analysts and experts here at Stratfor and RANE, we use our own standard for defining countries based on geopolitical realities. We started with the U.N. list (including the permanent observers), and then added Greenland, Hong Kong, Kosovo and Taiwan. All four of these added states operate independently in the world system, at least geopolitically, which we deemed distinct enough to warrant them being treated as individual actors. While bound to spark some controversy, our standard should not be construed as taking a side in the quest for independence in these disputed regions, but rather a necessary framework for us to do our jobs.

And that, there, is why there is no one “right” answer to how many countries there are in the world, as the definition of country will always depend on the context in which it’s being used. For us, it’s outlining the constraints and compulsions within states’ (sometimes disputed) borders. But for others, it may have nothing to do with geopolitics and everything to do with what is “home.” And neither one of us is more right than the other.

Crafty_Dog

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ccp

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Re: The United Nations/ US Sovereignty/International Law
« Reply #312 on: April 05, 2021, 02:18:39 PM »
Yellen to call for global minimum corporate tax rate

Vladimir Lenin, 1917 ,
on return to Petrograd from exile and

on top of a tank to cheering soldiers and sailors screamed :

"  long live the world wide socialist revolution !  "

[notice he did not say Russian]

the goal today is the same

Crafty_Dog

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Re: The United Nations/ US Sovereignty/International Law
« Reply #313 on: April 09, 2021, 06:57:55 AM »
April 9, 2021
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The Myth of a Rules-Based World
Thoughts in and around geopolitics.
By: George Friedman


Two concepts have been constantly used in discussions of international relations of late. One is a liberal international order and the second is a rules-based system. In the former, the term “liberal” does not have much to do with what Americans call liberalism. Rather, it describes an international system that is committed to human rights, free trade and related principles. The second is the idea that there is an agreed-upon system of rules governing the relationship between nations. Together, these notions are thought to create predictability and decency in the way nations interact with each other.

This issue came up during the administration of former President Donald Trump, who was accused of undermining these principles by, for example, imposing tariffs on China and questioning the value of NATO. The question is emerging again because the Biden administration, having come to power criticizing the policies of its predecessor, has made it clear that it intends to return to these principles.

The most important question is whether there ever was a rules-based international order or whether it was an illusion. There has long been a vision that the relationship between nations should not be a war of everyone against each other, but rather harmonious cooperation between states. Philosophers and theologians have dreamt of bringing this vision to life, and at various times attempts were made to institutionalize it.

In the 20th century, two attempts were made to create a rules-based, liberal system of international governance. The first was the League of Nations, which was founded after World War I and became defunct well before World War II broke out. It had rules, but no way to enforce them, both because the very nations violating its rules were members and, more important, because there were no means of enforcement. Adolf Hitler was not created by the liberal and rules-based order, but neither was he in any way inconvenienced by it.

The second attempt was the United Nations, which was created to be a more forceful League of Nations. The major powers that won World War II were recognized to be a special class of nations and given special powers on the Security Council. The problem with the Security Council was that both the United States and Soviet Union were permanent members, and the Soviet Union demanded that permanent members be allowed to veto actions that they opposed. As the world was then divided between the United States and the Soviet Union, opposed to each other in every way possible, the result was that nothing could get done. The United Nations was unable to enforce rules and sank into a complex bureaucracy of humanitarian actions designed to mitigate the pain caused by its failure to fulfill its mission. That mitigation was not trivial, but it did not constitute a rules-based system.

The Cold War was a chaotic mixture of subversion, civil wars, interventions and threats of nuclear exchange. The world was hardly liberal, with Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union and China living under communist rules, and the Third World, freeing itself from European imperialism, caught between U.S. and Soviet manipulation.

It is difficult to understand what rules-based liberal system we are expected to return to. After the fall of the Soviet Union, there was a momentary thrill that we were seeing the age of Aquarius rising. But it was the same illusion that followed the Napoleonic wars, World War I and World War II. The Congress of Vienna, the League of Nations and the United Nations all had rules but few of them were followed. The Maastricht Treaty was signed as the Soviet Union collapsed, and it did bring the rule of law to what had been one of the most lawless places in the world: Europe. But the rule of law was for Europe, and the rules were never as clear as was the sheer power of some of its members – namely, Germany. It’s liberal but not liberal enough to encompass the whole of European experience. The European Union has rules galore and some liberalism to boot, but Europe is just an idiosyncratic fragment of a global system it once ruled.

The post-Cold War era gave rise to Islamic radicalism, endless American wars and the rise of China, which had long followed its own rules, only some of which could be considered liberal. Accompanying this era was a sense that what mattered was the interests of the nation-state. What a state needed was its primary consideration, how to get it its obsession. Each nation determined how much liberalism it tolerated, and when instructed by outsiders as to how they should live, they often answered with insurrections.

There can be no rule of law, as the philosopher Thomas Hobbes said, without a Leviathan, an overwhelming power imposing it and administering it. For a time after the Soviet collapse, there was hope that the U.S. would helm a multilateral order rather than become the Leviathan. The U.S. had neither the interest nor the ability to rule the world, but right or wrong, it couldn't always escape trying – dominant powers tend to act in certain ways if they want to continue to be dominant powers.

And without the rule of law, liberalism was always impossible. There were international agreements followed to the extent it benefited nations, and there were some international organizations that were useful to be a part of. But the rule of law was invoked when the law supported a nation’s position, and liberalism could not rule a world that was a vast mixture of beliefs, all passionately embraced as the only truth. The liberal international order, in other words, existed when it was convenient. In some places, it never existed at all.

The idea that we must return to a glorious age in which nations were ruled by laws and liberalism is a fantasy, a fantasy that allows us to believe that we can return to it. It is a nostalgia for things that never were. The human condition binds humans to communities large and small that think of themselves as free. They do not submit to rules they have not made, nor to political principles they did not craft. The Greeks did not accept the rules of the Persians or their political order. So it was then, and so it is now. The world doesn’t change that much, and the only place we can return to is ourselves.


Crafty_Dog

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WSJ: Yellen, Biden & Congress trying to give away American sovereignty
« Reply #315 on: July 16, 2021, 03:14:02 PM »
The Biden Administration is planning the biggest overhaul to American taxation in decades, and you’d think members of Congress might have something to say about it. But no, for the most part a strange silence has greeted Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s bid to rope the United States into a revamp of global tax rules that by design robs Congress of its sovereignty over tax matters.

We’ve described the details of global tax rules being negotiated at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The plan would create a new method for other countries to tax American tech companies (although this is billed as a tax on any big, global firm), and also would establish a global minimum corporate-tax rate of 15%. As the New York Sun reminds us, this is a fundamental affront to American constitutional governance.

A bedrock principle since the country’s beginning has been that the power to tax must rest with the representatives elected by the people who pay the tax. Washington has always sought to defend this principle in the international sphere. The Senate has ratified dozens of tax treaties with foreign governments. These agreements try to ensure that a foreign government won’t impose taxes on income Congress already has taxed within the U.S., or to which Congress might lay claim because the company is headquartered in America.

Constitutional principles aside, this is good economic policy. Despite their flaws, current global rules broadly try to hand taxing authority to the jurisdiction where a company’s investors and managers have taken risks, engaged in product development or research and the like. This arrangement lets Congress experiment with tax laws it believes are best suited to the U.S. economy, and allows voters to pass judgment on lawmakers’ successes and failures.


***
The tax rules the OECD contemplates and Ms. Yellen supports are very different. The tech tax is an immediate threat to Congress’s constitutional power. Foreign leaders admit the point of the proposals is to redistribute to them some of the corporate revenue the U.S. Congress now taxes (or not).


This would allow sclerotic European countries to tax successful U.S. firms solely by dint of housing consumers rather than encouraging investment and risk-taking—while blunting the benefit of any incentives Congress wants to provide. There’s a reason French and German officials favor this approach over economic reforms to encourage the development of their own tech companies. They can piggyback off the work U.S. lawmakers have done to foster a vibrant economy in America.

The global minimum tax might seem like less of a threat to Congress’s prerogatives only because the OECD’s proposed rate of 15% is lower than the rate Congress might impose. But here too Ms. Yellen wants to encroach on Capitol Hill’s constitutional authority.

By binding the U.S. to the OECD’s complex system for calculating a minimum tax, Ms. Yellen is limiting the ability of a future Congress to change tax rates and the exemptions, deductions and other rules of the U.S. code. Meanwhile, she’s signaling U.S. assent to a system that might allow foreign governments to tax corporate revenue Congress deliberately chose not to tax, in order to “top up” corporate taxes to some desired minimum.

***
If this sounds familiar, it’s because the Obama-Biden Administration attempted the same gambit with the Iran nuclear deal in 2015. The idea there was to sign the U.S. up to agreements that would create facts on the ground that Congress would find hard to reverse. Something similar is underway as John Kerry jets around the world negotiating American commitments ahead of another global climate summit later this year.

When will Congress stand up for itself? Sen. Mike Crapo and Rep. Kevin Brady, ranking Republicans on Congress’s tax-writing committees, warned Ms. Yellen in a letter last week not to surrender any part of the U.S. tax base to foreign governments. They also requested closer consultation between Treasury and Congress before Ms. Yellen goes any further in global negotiations. Other Republicans should awake from their slumbers and fight too.

As for Democrats, they’re either silent or supportive of Ms. Yellen’s global gambit. Some may underestimate the threat OECD proposals pose to their own power as lawmakers. Others, especially progressives, may welcome the opportunity to insulate their high-tax policies from future Republican Congresses.

Either way they’re making an historic mistake. Congress’s constitutional role in setting tax policy for the U.S. and its citizens is central to self-government. No taxation without representation. The French helped America win the revolution under that banner, but that doesn’t mean Emmanuel Macron should be able to write U.S. tax policy.



DougMacG

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W. H. O. is in bed with WHOM?
« Reply #318 on: November 28, 2021, 06:59:14 AM »
WHO Skips ‘Xi’ in Greek Alphabet for Naming Coronavirus Variants ‘to Avoid Stigma’





DougMacG

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Re: The United Nations and the Russian Invasion of Ukraine
« Reply #323 on: February 24, 2022, 11:57:20 AM »
Who could have predicted that weakness invites aggression?

How come we can't have 100% unanimity on that?

Weakness invites aggression.

Peace through Strength.

Guns deter crime.

If you want peace, prepare for war.

Does a bully pick on the strongest or the weakest he encounters?

This stuff isn't that complicated, doesn't take second level thinking, even a Biden voter should be able to see it - now.

But no.  We will learn nothing from this.  Trump's fault.

DougMacG

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Disband UN United Nations Now
« Reply #324 on: March 08, 2022, 11:21:13 AM »
United Nations advises staff against using ‘war’ or ‘invasion’ regarding Ukraine
Email on communications policy reminds worker of responsibility to ‘be impartial’
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/united-nations-advises-staff-against-using-war-or-invasion-regarding-ukraine-1.4821438

First spell it out, it's evil you are impartial about.
-----------------------------------------------------

UN Security Council Action on Ukraine?

Russia is blocking Security Council action on the Ukraine war – but the UN is still the only international peace forum
https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/Russia-is-blocking-Security-Council-action-on-the-16982938.php
-----------------------------------------------------
Permanent members (P5) of the Security Council are China, France, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia.  Any of the five permanent members can veto a resolution to prevent its adoption by the council regardless of the level of support.
https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-five-permanent-members-of-the-un-security-council.html

Well that's (in)convenient.  How come Russia doesn't have a veto vote on the board of NATO?  Wait, they're the ones we pay a this money all these decades to defend against.

These 5 were allies at the end of WWII and are nuclear powers.

Time to disband this evil outfit, set some new criteria, and form a new band.
« Last Edit: March 08, 2022, 12:17:48 PM by DougMacG »



DougMacG

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Re: UN General Assembly votes to suspend Russia from Human Rights Council
« Reply #327 on: April 07, 2022, 10:15:39 AM »
Good symbolic step but they should be removed from the US security council, 'permanent' member status - if anyone over there was even a little bit serious.


Crafty_Dog

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Biden handing US sovereignty over to the WHO.
« Reply #329 on: May 15, 2022, 12:30:13 PM »
DANGER: The WHO's Death Trap for the US
Act Fast: They Vote Next Week
by Pete Hoekstra  •  May 15, 2022 at 5:00 am


This is a plan that Congress and the public need to fight vigorously.

The Biden administration, it appears, unless stopped immediately, is tee-ing up America to make it easy for the Chinese Communist Party to defeat it, and other nations, through biological warfare.

"On May 22-28, 2022, ultimate control over America's healthcare system, and hence its national sovereignty, will be delivered for a vote to the World Health Organization's governing legislative body, the World Health Assembly (WHA)." — Dr. Peter Breggin and Ginger Ross Breggin, America Out Loud, May 4, 2022.

"This threat is contained in new amendments to WHO's International Health Regulations, proposed by the Biden administration, that are scheduled as 'Provisional agenda item 16.2' at the upcoming conference on May 22-28, 2022." — Dr. Peter Breggin and Ginger Ross Breggin, America Out Loud, May 4, 2022.

"These amendments will empower WHO's Director-General to declare health emergencies or crises in any nation and to do so unilaterally and against the opposition of the target nation. The Director-General will be able to declare these health crises based merely on his personal opinion or consideration that there is a potential or possible threat to other nations." — Dr. Peter Breggin and Ginger Ross Breggin, America Out Loud, May 4, 2022.

"The targeted nation is also required to send WHO any relevant genetic sequence data." — Dr. Peter Breggin and Ginger Ross Breggin, America Out Loud, May 4, 2022.

"Under the new regulations, WHO will not be required to consult with the identified nation beforehand to "verify" the event before taking action." — Dr. Peter Breggin and Ginger Ross Breggin, America Out Loud, May 4, 2022.

Unfortunately, this "next pandemic" is neither far off nor a hypothetical "conspiracy theory." According to multiple credible reports from the U.S. Department of State, to the executive director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Peter Jennings, China has been preparing for bio-warfare using pathogens for more than six years.

A WHO with expanded authority is a terrifying concept. Can you envision providing an international organization with the power to dictate how the U.S. should respond to a future pandemic? Perhaps by forcing the U.S. to turn over supplies and equipment to China because of its larger population? How about an international organization that would have the power to mandate whether we should be required to be vaccinated with a particular vaccine, say China's inferior SINOVAC vaccine? Or imagine a WHO that has the power to impose what mandates or lockdowns a country would be required to impose, say like China's current lockdown of Shanghai? Unfortunately, the WHO already has proven itself to be a willing organ of China's Communist leaders. Providing it with international, legal binding authority over global pandemic response must never be allowed to happen.


A World Health Organization with expanded authority is a terrifying concept. Can you envision providing an international organization with the power to dictate how the U.S. should respond to a future pandemic? The WHO already has proven itself to be a willing organ of China's Communist leaders. Providing it with international, legal binding authority over global pandemic response must never be allowed to happen. Pictured: WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus pays a visit to Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing on January 28, 2020. (Photo by Naohiko Hatta/AFP via Getty Images)
The Biden administration, it appears, unless stopped immediately, is tee-ing up America to make it easy for the Chinese Communist Party to defeat it, and other nations, through biological warfare.

The World Health Organization (WHO), the organization that has unhesitatingly been doing China's bidding during the COVID pandemic, is reportedly now planning to orchestrate a massive new power grab to internationally control the response to any future global pandemic. The plan is apparently to make the health of Americans dependent on the whims of China -- which is both actively seeking to displace the US as the world's leading superpower and has for years been working on new means of bio-warfare.

It is a plan that is being voted on next week: Congress and the American public need to fight vigorously -- and FAST.




Crafty_Dog

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Monkeypox games could lay groundwork for WHO pandemic response takeover
« Reply #333 on: May 30, 2022, 03:19:41 AM »

President Biden is trying to hand over American health sovereignty to the WHO-- time to block this is very short:
======================

Monkeypox ‘Games’ Could Lay Groundwork for WHO Pandemic Response Takeover
Joshua Philipp
 May 24, 2022

The World Health Organization (WHO) is responding to a string of monkeypox outbreaks, and will be convening an emergency meeting on the virus and its global spread.

In terms of government power, the timing of this outbreak couldn’t be better for the WHO—which may soon be granted powers to manage laws on global health outbreaks, and which is oddly well-positioned for a monkeypox outbreak following a recent “germ-games” call, and recent incidents tied to figures who include Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates.

The New York Post declared, “The World Health Organization is reportedly convening an emergency meeting into the alarming spread of monkeypox around the world—including a possible case in the Big Apple.” The Telegraph reports that the United Nations health authority will be bringing together “a group of leading experts” in the meeting, which is believed to be focused on how the virus is suddenly spreading so widely. It also allegedly will look into the virus’s prevalence among homosexual men and on the “vaccination situation.”

The numbers of infections are by no means high. By May 23, the University of Oxford and Harvard Medical School recorded 245 either confirmed or suspected cases in the entire world. Sajid Javid, the UK health secretary, wrote on Twitter: “Most cases are mild …”

Epoch Times Photo
A woman is seen cycling in a completely empty Navona Square in Rome, on March 13, 2020. The city’s streets were eerily quiet on the second day of a nationwide shuttering of schools, shops, and other public places. (Marco Di Lauro/Getty Images)
The timing of all of this is important. It gives the WHO a chance to show its worth, since it’s in the process of trying to get new and expansive powers—under the banner of governing global health emergencies.

The United Nations is considering various amendments to the WHO at its 75th World Health Assembly in Geneva, that could give its director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the unilateral authority to declare a public health emergency with far-reaching powers over the laws of sovereign nations.

Not only would this give Tedros the ability to declare a public health emergency in any nation he wants—using whatever evidence he wants—but it would also allow him to dictate policies that the target country should adopt to respond to the U.N.’s declared emergency. If a country refuses, a proposed amendment could give the WHO the ability to sanction that country.

If you’re wondering whether giving such powers to a U.N. agency that couldn’t demonstrate its independence from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) could fly in the face of U.S. law, it seems that President Joe Biden has the answer. Not only is the Biden administration allowing this shift in power to the WHO, but it’s also helping advance it.

The United States proposed amendments to the WHO in January, which will be considered at the U.N. meeting in Geneva, The Epoch Times reports. These included an amendment that would allow the WHO to make public declarations on a health crisis without needing to consult with the target country, and without needing to get verification from local officials. The Biden administration’s proposals would also give $2.47 billion in funding to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for things including “enhancements to domestic sentinel surveillance programs,” “investments in global genomic surveillance approaches,” and other systems.

As The Epoch Times reports, “Respiratory surveillance platforms include video cameras and recorders that alert authorities when members of the public are seen coughing or otherwise acting in a manner that could indicate the presence of an infectious disease or help spread one already present in a population. Such equipment is widely used in China.”

Epoch Times Photo
A man wearing a protective face mask walks under surveillance cameras as China is hit by an outbreak of the novel coronavirus, in Shanghai, on March 4, 2020. (Aly Song/Reuters)
Whether or not monkeypox poses a large threat to public health, it presents a serious threat to public freedom. The virus could act as a Trojan horse, carrying inside it all the justifications to grant the WHO a dictator’s dream of global power, and give the CDC a system of surveillance beyond anything Orwell could have conceived.

Under normal circumstances, monkeypox wouldn’t be a large viral risk. The CDC states that it can be transmitted human-to-human mainly by respiratory droplets that typically don’t travel more than a few feet, and so it notes that “prolonged face-to-face contact is required.”

Even Biden is walking back his statements that people should be concerned about monkeypox, and is clarifying that it’s not as serious of a threat as COVID-19.

Regardless of its inability to spread widely under normal circumstances, a global discussion on monkeypox vaccines started in 2021 after Gates warned of a smallpox bioterrorist attack as a potential next pandemic. He called on world leaders to hold “germ games” and give the WHO new powers—similar to the ones they may soon receive—under a new WHO “Pandemic Task Force.”

Gates also called for pandemic surveillance systems, which seem eerily similar to what the Biden administration submitted in its proposed amendments for the WHO’s new powers.

“It’ll take probably about $1 billion a year for a pandemic Task Force at the WHO level, which is doing the surveillance and actually doing what I call ‘germ games’ where you practice.” Gates said in 2021, Sky News reported. “You say, OK, what if a bioterrorist brought smallpox to 10 airports? You know, how would the world respond to that?”

Even though the mention of smallpox by Gates was minor, it purportedly was used to justify new discussions on a smallpox vaccine that could also treat monkeypox. Just several days later, on Nov. 8, 2021, Precision Vaccinations reported, “Gates Germ-Game Warning Motivates Smallpox Vaccine Discussions.”

The “discussions” in question were about a Jynneos Smallpox and Monkeypox Vaccine—approved in 2019. Precision Vaccinations noted that it’s “the only FDA-approved non-replicating smallpox vaccine and the only FDA-approved monkeypox vaccine for non-military use.”

Movement within the CDC began a few days earlier, on Nov. 3, 2021. It says that “the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices reviewed the two presentations focused on the smallpox vaccine Jynneos.”

And then, just several days later, an even stranger occurrence took place—carrying out the idea of a “germ game” similar to what Gates proposed.

The Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) partnered with the Munich Security Conference to imagine a pandemic scenario with monkeypox. Following the hypothetical warning from Gates, the germ game imagined a strain of monkeypox, released through a bioterrorist attack, that had been altered to be resistant to vaccines.

On Nov. 23, 2021, the NTI published its results from the tabletop game, which showed the spread of the virus over the course of 18 months.

“By the end of the exercise, the fictional pandemic resulted in more than 3 billion cases and 270 million fatalities worldwide,” it states.

In an incredible act of foresight, the exercise from last year imagined that monkeypox would appear almost exactly when it did: in mid-May this year.

The NTI also published a detailed report on its results. According to a timeline on page 12 of the report, it imagined that in May 2022, the initial outbreak of monkeypox would infect 1,421 people and kill four people. By January 2023, it would spread to 83 countries, infect 70 million, and kill 1.3 million. At that point, it would be discovered that monkeypox had been engineered to be vaccine-resistant, and supply chain challenges would make a response more difficult.

After one year, on May 10, 2023, it was predicted to infect 480 million people and kill 27 million, and it would be revealed that a bioterror attack on a civilian biolab had been the origin. Then, by Dec. 1, 2023, the virus would be estimated to infect 3.2 billion people and kill 271 million.

Of course, the important caveat with their estimates is that the monkeypox strain they imagined was one that had been engineered to be vaccine-resistant. Accurate or not, the exercise gives authorities a predictive scenario to justify “pandemic response” policies. And we’ve seen this happen before.

Epoch Times Photo
Vials of smallpox vaccine sit on a counter at a vaccination facility in Altamonte Springs, Fla., on Dec. 16, 2002. (Chris Livingston/Getty Images)
A very similar “germ game” was held just before the outbreak of COVID-19, with many of the same figures involved now making noise about monkeypox and a new “pandemic.”

New York Magazine reported in February 2020 that “two months before the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 emerged in central China, a group of public-health experts gathered in New York City for a simulation.” It also noted, “The characteristics of the virus currently causing global havoc are remarkably similar to the one proposed in the simulation, dubbed ‘Event 201.’”

Partners in the exercise included the World Economic Forum and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Similar to the monkeypox “germ game” before the monkeypox outbreak, the coronavirus “germ game” before the coronavirus outbreak made predictions of a mass fatality scenario. It estimated that 65 million people would die.

The Center for Health Security issued a statement on its coronavirus exercise on Jan. 24, 2020. It stated that they weren’t predicting that COVID-19 would kill 65 million people, as the simulated virus was different from the CCP virus.

Yet the important thing wasn’t the specifics of the “germ game,” but instead, how the game and its participants went on to inform government policy.

And now, with monkeypox, we’ve arrived at a similar impasse. A “germ game” imagined the potential effect of the virus, and produced inflated numbers of deaths and infections by an imaginary version of monkeypox as the model, which was resistant to vaccines. Most importantly, this also coincides with the international community weighing whether the WHO should be granted powers to govern global health emergencies.

Among the trends of COVID-19 is that governments may now be more inclined to use a seasonal virus, already declared as endemic, to justify an indefinite global emergency. Additionally, small outbreaks can also be used to justify deeply authoritarian policies that aren’t limited to health care.

The worst example of this is the CCP, which is claiming to use single-digit infections to lock down entire megacities. And remember that under the Trump administration, the WHO was shown to be unable to demonstrate its independence from the CCP.

Health emergency response is also no longer limited to just medicine. The COVID-19 model included mass changes to election systems that undermined the basic integrity of elected government, and widespread censorship under the narrative of fighting “disinformation” and “misinformation.” Remember that at the beginning of the pandemic, the WHO and various U.N. agencies declared an “infodemic” that required controls and censorship of public information.

In the backdrop of the monkeypox scare, the world is preparing to hand the keys to the kingdom to the WHO. And with the strange track of “germ games” and overblown numbers by the so-called experts pulling the strings, the groundwork for this public takeover has already been laid.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

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WTO deal enables Chinese theft of US vax technology
« Reply #334 on: June 18, 2022, 03:13:30 PM »
Ambassadors discuss before the opening ceremony of the 12th Ministerial Conference at the headquarters of the World Trade Organization in Geneva, June 12.
PHOTO: MARTIAL TREZZINI/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

The World Trade Organization was created to protect free-trade rules to spread prosperity. Now it’s becoming a vehicle to raid U.S. innovation. See Friday’s agreement by the WTO’s 164 members that lets developing countries, including China, steal intellectual property for Covid vaccines.

The White House is flogging the deal as a diplomatic victory. But it’s an enormous defeat for U.S. national interests that will benefit China and set a precedent that erodes intellectual property protection. This won’t be the last time global grifters seek to pilfer U.S. technology.

The WTO fight began in fall 2020 when India and South Africa submitted a resolution to suspend IP protection for Covid vaccines, therapeutics and tests. They quickly rallied support from low-income countries and progressives who complained about a lack of “equity.” Never mind that the U.S. and Europe financed the development of these technologies.

Succumbing to pressure from the left, President Biden endorsed an IP waiver. He also undercut European allies who opposed the patent giveaway. And for what? Vaccine makers had already committed billions of doses to developing countries. Now the world is awash in vaccine doses and tens of millions are thrown out because low-income countries lack the healthcare infrastructure to distribute them. This makes the WTO agreement all the more perplexing.

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WTO rules already set out a process for compulsory patent licensing of drugs in developing countries during public-health emergencies. These rules require some due process and fair compensation for drug makers. They also protect against public disclosure of clinical trial data that include trade secrets. The new agreement overrides these rules.

An earlier draft of the compromise would have prevented China from taking advantage of the waiver. Friday’s agreement doesn’t. It merely says that developing countries such as China “with existing capacity to manufacture COVID-19 vaccines are encouraged to make a binding commitment not to avail themselves of this Decision” (our emphasis).

In short, there’s nothing legally binding to stop China from stealing U.S. mRNA technology, using it to develop its own vaccines including for other diseases, and then selling the shots under their own brands. The agreement lasts five years so it could potentially cover a future combined mRNA vaccine for Covid, flu and respiratory syncytial virus.

Despite their victory, waiver advocates aren’t satisfied. “Vaccines have already lost relevance,” India’s Minister of Commerce and Industry Shri Piyush Goyal said. The West’s “hope is to unburden their chest of any guilt today, show the world that we have been so magnanimous today, kick the can down the road for therapeutics and diagnostics which are really now essential.”

Guilt for what? Saving millions of lives through biotech innovation?

The only silver lining is the agreement doesn’t extend to Covid testing technologies and therapeutics, at least for now. But it requires WTO members to decide within six months whether to do so. Will the Biden Administration rush to the ramparts to defend Pfizer’s Paxlovid patents this fall? Don’t bet on it.

Why did the Biden Administration and Europeans go along with the deal? Maybe they figure countries won’t take advantage of it because Covid vaccines are plentiful. But this is short-sighted. Now that the WTO has set the precedent of breaking patents during emergencies, there will surely be more demands to do for other “essential” technologies.

Lo, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres recently proclaimed that “renewable energy technologies, such as battery storage, must be treated as essential and freely-available global public goods” and “removing obstacles to knowledge sharing and technological transfer—including intellectual property constraints—is crucial for a rapid and fair renewable energy transition.”

Semiconductors and genetically engineered crops could become fair game too. IP protection encourages companies to invest in new technology. It is a major reason the U.S. is more innovative than China. By undermining the incentives that underpin innovation, the WTO agreement will hurt America, and that means the world too.



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UN 2030 Agenda behind Farming Restrictions
« Reply #337 on: July 21, 2022, 02:15:37 PM »
Alex Newman Explains UN Agenda 2030 Behind Farming Restrictions
By Ella Kietlinska and Joshua Philipp July 20, 2022 Updated: July 20, 2022 biggersmaller Print


The United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for sustainable development informs government policies to restrict farming and transform the food systems in different parts of the world, said Alex Newman, an award-winning international journalist who has covered this issue for over a decade.

The 2030 Agenda is a plan of action devised by the United Nations (U.N.) to achieve 17 sustainable development goals (SDG). The goals and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development were adopted by all UN member states in 2015.

Then-Secretary General of the U.N. Ban Ki-moon called the 2030 Agenda “the global declaration of interdependence,” (pdf) Newman said in a recent interview on EpochTV’s “Crossroads” program.

“In my opinion, [it] was a direct swipe at our Declaration of Independence … So instead of being independent nations, we will all be now interdependent.”

The 2030 Agenda “covers every element of human life, every element of the economy,” including global wealth redistribution not only within the nations but also among the nations, Newman commented. The Agenda “specifically says that we need to change the way that we consume and produce goods,” he added.

Goal number two on the 2030 Agenda deals specifically with food, Newman said.

In September 2021, the U.N. held the Food Systems Summit, which emphasized the need “to leverage the power of food systems” for the purpose of achieving all 17 sustainable development goals by 2030, according to a U.N. statement.

“Everyone, everywhere, must take action and work together to transform the way the world produces, consumes, and thinks about food,” the statement said.

Taking Over Farmland
The sustainable development agenda emerged in the 1970s when the United Nations tried to define it at a conference in Vancouver, Canada, in 1976. Newman said.

The conference, which was the first U.N. Conference on Human Settlements known as Habitat I, adopted the Vancouver Declaration (pdf), a report that provided recommendations for U.N. member states.

Newman quoted an excerpt from this report: “Land cannot be treated as an ordinary asset controlled by individuals and subject to the pressures and inefficiencies of the market. Private land ownership is also a principal instrument of accumulation and concentration of wealth, therefore contributes to social injustice.”

Newman said that, in his view, the U.N. ultimately wants to get rid of private land ownership. “We see this all over the world. This is not just happening in the Netherlands.”

He thinks that a war is taking place against farmers and ranchers, especially those who are independent or those who are not part of the system. “They want to remove small farmers, even medium farmers, from their land, and they want to bring it all under the control of these—I think there’s no other term to describe it—fascistic public-private partnerships.”

Newman noted some examples to illustrate his opinion: The Chinese regime forces peasants to move to megacities, farmers are killed in South Africa, and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in the United States proposed a new rule that could bankrupt small and medium farmers.

In March 2022, the SEC proposed a regulation that “would mandate publicly traded companies to report on their carbon emissions and other climate-related information,” as well as report similar information from any companies with which they do business, according to an SEC statement.

As a consequence, all companies in the business supply chain of a publicly traded entity would have to report their carbon emission and climate-related data.

U.S. Sens. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and John Hoeven (R-N.D.) led 30 lawmakers to urge SEC to repeal its proposal, calling it a “regulatory overreach.”

”Imposing regulatory overreach on farmers and ranchers falls outside of the SEC’s congressionally provided authority,” the senators said in a statement. “This substantial reporting requirement would significantly burden small, family-owned farms.”

The American Farm Bureau Federation said in a statement that the proposed rule could create “substantial costs” for farmers because they do not have teams of compliance officers or attorneys like large corporations. Moreover, it may push out of business small and medium-sized farmers and force food-processing companies to look for agricultural raw products outside of the United States, the statement asserted.

Centralizing Food Supply
1.tagreuters.com2022binary_LYNXMPEI6B10I-FILEDIMAGE
People shop in a supermarket as inflation affects consumer prices in New York on June 10, 2022. (Andrew Kelly/Reuters)
 “If you control the food supply, you control everything,” Newman said.

“One of the things that the communists loved to do is create scarcity and create dependents. As long as you have independent people who are able to take care of themselves, there really is no need for the government to run your life and to control everything that you do,” Newman said.

“Americans are good examples,” Newman continued. “As long as the food production is widely diffused, and it’s in the hands of independent producers, it becomes very difficult to get people to bend to your will.”

The whole idea of using food as a weapon has been a hallmark of communist regimes for 100 years, Newman explained. “It’s also been a hallmark of the very same people who are openly promoting the U.N. Agenda 2030, the sustainable development goals, and even the World Economic Forum.”

Those who contrived “the controlled demolition of our food supply … want to completely restructure it,” in order to gain total centralized control of that because it gives them absolute power over everybody under their jurisdiction, Newman said.

For example, the Chinese regime and the mega-corporations formed a public-private partnership to centralize control of the food supply, Newman said.

It’s similar to what occurred in Nazi Germany, where on paper private companies own the business and ostensibly manage their businesses, but, ultimately, the private companies will be taking their orders from the government, Newman explained.

In the United States, the ESG metrics are used to “hijack control of the business sector, of the individual companies, and put them at the service of the goals of what I call the predator class—the people behind the World Economic Forum, behind the United Nations,” Newman said. (ESG stands for environmental, social, and governance criteria that are used to evaluate companies on how compliant they are with sustainability.)

The food supply centralization is just one component of their agenda, but it is a very critical one, which along with energy and other things, allows them to control humanity, he added.

In January 2021, the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the government of the Netherlands launched a new initiative called Food Innovation Hub, according to a WEF statement. The Hub, joined by several public and private sector partners, is a key platform that will use technology and innovations for food systems transformation, the statement said.

The Food Innovation Hub secured “multiyear funding “ from the Netherlands’ government and established its Global Coordinating Secretariat that would coordinate the efforts of the regional food hubs as well as align with global food processes and initiatives such as the UN Food Systems Summit, the statement read.

The global food Secretariat would be located in Wageningen, Netherlands, at the heart of the Dutch agrifood ecosystem, and would direct the development of global, regional Food Innovation Hubs, according to the “Invest in Holland” website.

“The work of these regional hubs is already underway, with more than 20 organizations leading the initiative across Africa, ASEAN [Association of Southeast Asian Nations], Colombia, and India, and the European hub,” the website said.

Ramon Laguarta, CEO of PepsiCo, said in the WEF statement: “Food is one of the main levers we can pull to improve environmental and societal health. With the right investment, innovation, and robust collaboration, agriculture could become the world’s first sector to become carbon negative. … Unlocking this potential will take ambitious multi-stakeholder, pre-competitive collaborations to transform the food system—exactly what these Hubs are designed to cultivate.”

Among the solutions advocated by the WEF to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions is replacing livestock-derived foods with alternative forms of protein, such as insects, and lab-cultured proteins, according to a 2019 white paper (pdf) commissioned by the WEF.


In response to this recommendation, several indoor agriculture start-ups have emerged, including Ÿnsect, “the first fully automated vertical insect farm in the world, able to produce 100,000 tons of insect products a year,” a WEF report said.

In March, France-based Ÿnsect acquired Jord Producers, a U.S. mealworm manufacturer, to expand its operations in the United States by entering the American chicken feed market, said a company statement.

How People Can Stop Food Takeover

If people want to prevent food supply from being used as a tool to control them, they need to find alternative sources of food locally, Newman said. “You need to have a relationship with the local farmers in your community, get to the local farmers market, deal with the local farmers, come up with some agreement,” such as getting delivery of fresh, seasonal produce from the local farms for 100 bucks a week, he said.

“We need to really start providing an alternative economic structure, because if we let them get control of the entire food supply, I guarantee you, it will be used as a weapon to take your freedom, to get you to do things you otherwise wouldn’t want to do, to undermine the sovereignty of your nation, whether you’re in the United States or another country, and ultimately to dispossess people of their private land and of their freedom.”

“If you have agricultural land, do not sell out to these people. They’re trying to bribe the farmers to leave their land.

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Re: The United Nations/ US Sovereignty/International Law
« Reply #338 on: July 29, 2022, 09:19:12 PM »
ttt

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How to fight the WHO power grab!
« Reply #339 on: September 06, 2022, 02:46:21 AM »
Dear Friends,

Today and until 13 September, the World Health Organization has opened public comment on the extreme power grab they are attempting via their international pandemic treaty and via the legally binding amendments to the International Health Regulations, originally proposed by the US. Details, including contact email addresses, can be found here: https://jamesroguski.substack.com/p/stopthewhocom?utm_source=email.

If ratified, these changes would hand over national self-determination in public health issues, resulting in globalist interference in personal healthcare sovereignty and bodily autonomy for people of all nations. The WHO is an unelected, unaccountable body with no oversight, checks or balances. It must not be allowed to dictate global healthcare policy. Although no one can predict what is to come, if we allow our governments to lay our sovereign self-determination at the feet of the WHO/UN, we run the risk of a technocratic, totalitarian future of forced drug treatments and injections, vaccine passports, restricted assembly, travel and commerce, quarantine camps, and constant surveillance.

Regardless of which country you live in, would you take some time to read the above link, submit an email or video comment to the WHO, and encourage friends and family to do the same? It is my sincere hope that, together, we can put a stop to this madness.

Also, US citizens, please take a moment to send this pre-written letter (https://alignact.com/go/stop-the-who-from-taking-away-our-national-sovereignty) to Congressional representatives around the country (not just your state's elected reps), alerting them to the extra-governmental activities being orchestrated by the US Dept. of Health and Human Services to surrender sovereignty in matters of public health to the WHO without Congressional approval.

If you have doubts or questions about these matters, please don't hesitate to contact me.

With love and hopeful aspirations,
Ari

===========================

https://jamesroguski.substack.com/p/stopthewhocom?utm_source=email
« Last Edit: September 06, 2022, 02:53:15 AM by Crafty_Dog »


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Biden bending the knee to the WHO
« Reply #341 on: February 20, 2023, 07:59:25 AM »


Biden Admin Negotiates Deal to Give WHO Authority Over US Pandemic Policies
New international health accord avoids necessary Senate approval
EXECUTIVE BRANCH
Kevin Stocklin
Feb 18 2023


The Biden administration is preparing to sign up the United States to a “legally binding” accord with the World Health Organization (WHO) that would give this Geneva-based UN subsidiary the authority to dictate America’s policies during a pandemic.

Despite widespread criticism of the WHO’s response to the COVID pandemic, U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Xavier Becerra joined with WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in September 2022 to announce “the U.S.-WHO Strategic Dialogue.” Together, they developed a “platform to maximize the longstanding U.S. government-WHO partnership, and to protect and promote the health of all people around the globe, including the American people.”

These discussions and others spawned the “zero draft” (pdf) of a pandemic treaty, published on Feb. 1, which now seeks ratification by all 194 WHO member states. A meeting of the WHO’s Intergovernmental Negotiating Body (INB) is scheduled for Feb. 27 to work out the final terms, which all members will then sign.

Written under the banner of “the world together equitably,” the zero draft grants the WHO the power to declare and manage a global pandemic emergency. Once a health emergency is declared, all signatories, including the United States, would submit to the authority of the WHO regarding treatments, government regulations such as lockdowns and vaccine mandates, global supply chains, and monitoring and surveillance of populations.

Centralized Pandemic Response

“They want to see a centralized, vaccine-and-medication-based response, and a very restrictive response in terms of controlling populations,” David Bell, a public health physician and former WHO staffer specializing in epidemic policy, told The Epoch Times. “They get to decide what is a health emergency, and they are putting in place a surveillance mechanism that will ensure that there are potential emergencies to declare.”


The WHO pandemic treaty is part of a two-track effort, coinciding with an initiative by the World Health Assembly (WHA) to create new global pandemic regulations that would also supersede the laws of member states. The WHA is the rule-making body of the WHO, comprised of representatives from the member states.

“Both [initiatives] are fatally dangerous,” Francis Boyle, professor of international law at Illinois University, told The Epoch Times. “Either one or both would set up a worldwide medical police state under the control of the WHO, and in particular WHO Director-General Tedros. If either one or both of these go through, Tedros or his successor will be able to issue orders that will go all the way down the pipe to your primary care physicians.”

Physician Meryl Nass told The Epoch Times: “If these rules go through as currently drafted, I, as a doctor, will be told what I am allowed to give a patient and what I am prohibited from giving a patient whenever the WHO declares a public health emergency. So they can tell you you’re getting remdesivir, but you can’t have hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin. What they’re also saying is they believe in equity, which means everybody in the world gets vaccinated, whether or not you need it, whether or not you’re already immune.”

Regarding medical treatments, the accord would require member nations to “monitor and regulate against substandard and falsified pandemic-related products.” Based on previous WHO and Biden administration policy, this would likely include forcing populations to take newly-developed vaccines while preventing doctors from prescribing non-vaccine treatments or medicines.

Circumventing America’s Constitution

A key question surrounding the accord is whether the Biden administration can bind America to treaties and agreements without the consent of the U.S. Senate, which is required under the Constitution. The zero draft concedes that, per international law, treaties between countries must be ratified by national legislatures, thus respecting the right of their citizens to consent. However, the draft also includes a clause that the accord will go into effect on a “provisional” basis, as soon as it is signed by delegates to the WHO, and therefore it will be legally binding on members without being ratified by legislatures.

“Whoever drafted this clause knew as much about U.S. constitutional law and international law as I did, and deliberately drafted it to circumvent the power of the Senate to give its advice and consent to treaties, to provisionally bring it into force immediately upon signature,” Boyle said. In addition, “the Biden administration will take the position that this is an international executive agreement that the president can conclude of his own accord without approval by Congress, and is binding on the United States of America, including all state and local democratically elected officials, governors, attorney generals and health officials.”

There are several U.S. Supreme Court decisions that may support the Biden administration in this. They include State of Missouri v. Holland, in which the Supreme Court ruled that treaties supersede state laws. Other decisions, such as United States v. Belmont, ruled that executive agreements without Senate consent can be legally binding, with the force of treaties.

There are parallels between the WHO pandemic accord and a recent OECD global tax agreement, which the Biden administration signed on to but which Republicans say has “no path forward” to legislative approval. In the OECD agreement, there are punitive terms built in that allow foreign countries to punish American companies if the deal is not ratified by the United States.

As with the OECD tax agreement, administration officials are attempting to appeal to international organizations to impose policies that have been rejected by America’s voters. Under the U.S. Constitution, health care does not fall under the authority of the federal government; it is the domain of the states. The Biden administration found this to be an unwelcome impediment to its attempts to impose vaccine and mask mandates on Americans, when courts ruled that federal agencies did not have the authority to do so.

“To circumvent that, they went to the WHO, for either the regulations or the treaty, to get around domestic opposition,” Boyle said.
According to the zero draft, signatories would agree to “strengthen the capacity and performance of national regulatory authorities and increase the harmonization of regulatory requirements at the international and regional level.” They will also implement a “whole-of-government and whole-of-society approach at the national level” that will include national governments, local governments, and private companies.

The zero draft stated that this new accord is necessary because of “the catastrophic failure of the international community in showing solidarity and equity in response to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic.”

A report from the WHO’s Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response (pdf) characterized the WHO’s performance as a “toxic cocktail” of bad decisions. Co-chair Ellen Johnson Sirleaf told the BBC it was due to “a myriad of failures, gaps and delays.” The solutions proposed by that report, however, did not suggest more local autonomy or diversified decision-making, but rather greater centralization, more power, and more money for the WHO.

‘One Health Surveillance’ and Misinformation

The WHO pandemic agreement calls for member states to implement “One Health surveillance.” One Health is a concept that has been embraced by the UN, the CDC, the World Bank, and other global organizations.

“The term originally meant a way of seeing human and animal health as linked—they sometimes are—so that you could improve human health by acting more broadly,” Bell said. “It has become hijacked and now is used to claim that all human activities, and all issues within the biosphere, affect health, and are therefore within Public Health’s remit. So public health can be deemed to include climate, or racism, or fisheries management, and this is being used to claim that addressing carbon emissions is a health issue and therefore a health ‘emergency.’”

The WHO zero draft states that “‘One Health surveillance’ means …,” leaving the definition to be worked out in future drafts. Whatever One Health surveillance ultimately entails, however, the signatories must invest in it, implement it, and “strengthen” it. In September 2022, the World Bank approved a Financial Intermediary Fund (FIF) to finance, among other things, One Health surveillance.

Signatories also agree to support the official narrative when it comes to information about a pandemic. Specifically, they will “conduct regular social listening and analysis to identify the prevalence and profiles of misinformation” and “design communications and messaging strategies for the public to counteract misinformation, disinformation and false news, thereby strengthening public trust.”

This aligns with efforts by the Biden administration to, as former White House Press Secretary Jennifer Psaki put it, “make sure social media companies are aware of the latest narratives dangerous to public health … and engage with them to better understand the enforcement of social media platform policies.” Or as UN Undersecretary-General Melissa Fleming stated at a 2022 World Economic Forum panel on “Tackling Disinformation” in Davos, “We own the science and we think that the world should know it.”

The official narrative during the COVID pandemic included support for lockdowns, school closures, and masking—all of which have since proven to be ineffective in stopping the spread of the virus and damaging to public health. A group of more than 900,000 doctors, epidemiologists, and public health scientists jointly signed the Great Barrington Declaration in 2020, expressing “grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies.” This declaration was widely derided as dangerous misinformation and was censored on social media.
“The views that they crushed were orthodox public health,” Bell said. Up until 2019, public health guidelines “specifically said that things like prolonged border closures, closing stores, etc. were harmful, particularly for low-income people, and shouldn’t be done beyond a few weeks.”

Those who pushed for lockdowns “were very clear that what they were recommending for COVID was going to be extremely harmful, and that the harm would outweigh the benefit,” Bell said. “They were clear because they wrote that down before, and there’s nothing new in the idea that impoverishing people reduces life expectancy. Something dramatically changed their minds, and that something wasn’t evidence, so we can only assume that it was pressure from vested interests.”

In January, a survey presented at the World Economic Forum found that public trust in government has plummeted since the start of the pandemic, though attendees were at a loss to explain the reasons for the decline in trust. Instead, the discussion at the panel, titled “Disrupting Distrust,” focused on combating rogue news sources that challenged the central narrative.

America’s Membership in the WHO

In July 2020, then-President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from membership in the WHO. Citing the WHO’s dismal performance in responding to the COVID pandemic and its ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Trump said that U.S. funding of approximately half a billion dollars per year would also cease.

In response, then-presidential-candidate Joe Biden vowed: “On my first day as President, I will rejoin the WHO and restore our leadership on the world stage.” Biden kept his promise and took it one step further, negotiating the pandemic accord.

Today, GOP lawmakers are attempting to revive the effort to take the United States out of the WHO. On Jan. 12, House Republicans introduced the “No Taxpayer Funding for the World Health Organization Act,” which was sponsored by 16 representatives.

Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.), lead sponsor of the bill, stated: “Funneling millions of taxpayer dollars to the corrupt World Health Organization that serves the Chinese Communist Party is a slap in the face to hardworking American families struggling under record high inflation, and to all those whose lives and livelihoods were ruined and destroyed by the COVID pandemic. The WHO … praised China for their ‘leadership’ at the beginning of COVID-19 and has done nothing to hold the CCP accountable for the spread of COVID-19.”

The pandemic accord, a spokesman for Roy told The Epoch Times, “is just another reason to defund the WHO.”

Redefining Sovereignty and Human Rights

The zero draft of the accord states that national sovereignty remains a priority, but within limits. “States have, in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations and the principles of international law, the sovereign right to determine and manage their approach to pubic health,” the draft declares, “provided that activities within their jurisdiction or control do not cause damage to their peoples and other countries.”

The accord states that human rights are also important, and it mandates that “people living under any restrictions on the freedom of movement, such as quarantines and isolations, have sufficient access to medication, health services and other necessities and rights.” The accord presents human rights as “health equity, through resolute action on social, environmental, cultural, political and economic determinants of health.”

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WT: Rep Senators push back on giving sovereignty to WHO
« Reply #342 on: February 22, 2023, 07:55:51 AM »
Republican Senators Push Back Against Accord Giving WHO Power Over US Pandemic Response
Legal experts question whether Senate approval is necessary
By Kevin Stocklin
February 21, 2023Updated: February 22, 2023


As member states of the World Health Organization (WHO) prepare to gather in Switzerland next week to negotiate final terms of an accord that will give the WHO centralized authority over U.S. policy in the case of a pandemic, Republican senators are pushing back with an effort to reinforce congressional power to authorize treaties.

The draft accord, which would be “legally binding” on all 194 member nations, gives the WHO the authority to declare pandemics and submits member countries to “the central role of the WHO as the directing and coordinating authority on international health work,” in areas like lockdowns, treatments, medical supply chains, surveillance, and “disinformation and false news,” once a pandemic is declared.

Seventeen U.S. senators, led by Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), introduced the “No WHO Pandemic Preparedness Treaty Without Senate Approval Act” on Feb 15, which states that the pandemic accord must be deemed a treaty, thus requiring the consent of a supermajority of the Senate, which is two-thirds, or 67 senators. The legislation comes as the WHO gears up to present what it calls the “zero draft” of the accord, negotiated with the help of U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, to all member nations on Feb. 27 to agree final terms.

Other sponsors of the bill included Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.), John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), Mike Lee (R-Utah), Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), Rick Scott (R-Fla.), John Hoeven (R-N.D.), Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Steve Daines (R-Mont.), Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), Mike Braun (R-Ind.), Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), Roger Marshall (R-Kan.), and Katie Britt (R-Ala.).

“The WHO, along with our federal health agencies, failed miserably in their response to COVID-19,” Sen. Johnson stated. “This failure should not be rewarded with a new international treaty that would increase the WHO’s power at the expense of American sovereignty.”

But some doubt this bill, even if approved, will stop the WHO accord from going into effect once President Joe Biden signs it.

“With all due respect to the sponsoring senators, that will not do the trick,” Francis Boyle, professor of international law at Illinois University, told The Epoch Times. The reason, he said, is that the WHO accord is drafted specifically to circumvent the Senate-approval process, and Congress instead should immediately withhold its yearly contributions to the WHO and take the United States out of the organization.

Currently, the United States is the largest contributor to the WHO’s $6.72 billion budget, of which $1.25 billion is for “health emergencies.” The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is the second largest donor to the WHO, contributing 9 percent of its budget in 2021; China is the third.

Will Biden Need Senate Approval for WHO Accord?

It remains unclear if the Biden administration will need Senate approval for the WHO accord to go into effect. The accord itself states that it will become effective and legally binding on member states “provisionally,” as soon as it is signed and before any national legislatures approve it.

“The Biden administration can indicate that it is provisionally bringing this treaty into force upon the mere signature of the treaty,” Boyle said. “Hence, it will come into force here in the United States provisionally until the Senate decides whether or not it is going to give its advice and consent to the treaty. I personally know of no other U.S. treaty that provides for its provisional application pending the U.S. Senate giving its advice and consent to the treaty.”

While the U.S. Constitution states that the president can make treaties “provided two-thirds of the senators present concur,” American presidents have increasingly been signing international agreements without Senate consent, and those agreements have taken effect in the United States regardless.


According to the Senate’s website: “Treaties to which the United States is a party also have the force of federal legislation, forming part of what the Constitution calls ‘the supreme Law of the Land’ … In recent decades, presidents have frequently entered the United States into international agreements without the advice and consent of the Senate. These are called ‘executive agreements.’ Though not brought before the Senate for approval, executive agreements are still binding on the parties under international law.”

A report by Justia, a legal analysis and marketing firm, states that “the executive agreement has surpassed in number and perhaps in international influence the treaty formally signed, submitted for ratification to the Senate, and proclaimed upon ratification.

“During the first half-century of its independence, the United States was party to 60 treaties but to only 27 published executive agreements,” the report states. “Between 1939 and 1993, executive agreements comprised more than 90 percent of the international agreements concluded.”

The U.S. Supreme Court has on several occasions supported the notion that these executive agreements constitute federal law and supersede state laws and regulations. This includes State of Missouri v. Holland, which ruled that treaties supersede state laws, and United States v. Belmont, which ruled that executive agreements without Senate consent are legally binding on Americans. Under the U.S. Constitution, health policy falls under state jurisdiction, but the WHO pandemic accord may be a way to bring health policy under the jurisdiction of the federal government, once the WHO declares a pandemic.

Increasingly, the Biden administration is looking toward international agreements to do what it can’t get be achieved through Congress. Most recently, having failed to increase corporate taxes in Congress, the Biden administration entered into an international agreement with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to set minimum tax levels on all corporations within signatory countries. While GOP lawmakers said the agreement had “no path forward” toward approval as a treaty, provisions written into the agreement allowed foreign countries to tax U.S.-based corporate profits as a punitive measure, if senators do not approve it.

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WSJ: The wrong way to go after Putin
« Reply #343 on: March 17, 2023, 03:47:08 PM »
The Wrong Way to Beat Putin
The U.S. should steer clear of endorsing the International Criminal Court’s warrants.
By The Editorial BoardFollow
March 17, 2023 6:37 pm ET


There’s no doubt that Russia has committed horrific war crimes in Ukraine, and the perpetrators deserve to be punished. But Friday’s decision by the International Criminal Court to issue arrest warrants for Vladimir Putin and another Russian official is the wrong way to do it.


The ICC, an international institution separate from the United Nations and based in The Hague, didn’t disclose the details of the warrants even as it announced them. But they appear to be aimed at the deportation of children to Russia from Ukraine by Russian forces since the invasion. The Kyiv government says some 16,000 children have been taken to Russia from Ukrainian territory, and only 307 have been returned.

In addition to Mr. Putin, the ICC issued a warrant against Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova, the commissioner for children’s rights in the Kremlin. She has overseen the deportations. “There are reasonable grounds to believe that Mr. Putin bears individual criminal responsibility” for the crimes, the ICC said.

The warrants are no doubt satisfying as a moral statement, and Ukraine welcomed them. Human-rights and international-law aficionados are praising the warrants as a sign that even heads of state and military leaders can’t commit war crimes without being held accountable.

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But the Biden Administration should steer clear of endorsing the ICC’s action even in this case. The U.S. hasn’t ratified the Rome Statute that formed the governing charter for the ICC. Neither have Russia and China. The U.S. has never endorsed the idea that a treaty applies to a country that isn’t a party to it.

Bill Clinton signed the Rome Statute in 2000, but George W. Bush repudiated it on grounds that anti-American ICC prosecutors and judges might target U.S. soldiers or government officials. That has proven to be wise.

In 2017 ICC prosecutors sought to open an investigation into alleged war crimes by the U.S. military in Afghanistan. The Trump Administration protested and in imposed sanctions on ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda and another court official. The court later suspended the investigation, but the fact that it was even considered shows the political nature of the court.

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Not much is likely to come from the latest ICC warrants. The only way to enforce them is to have some future Russian government turn Mr. Putin over to the court. Issuing warrants that are feckless may be worse than doing nothing. The best way to defeat Mr. Putin is to give Ukraine the arms it needs to defeat Russia on the battlefield. The path to justice is for Ukraine to prosecute those responsible, rather than an unaccountable international court.

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WSJ: Phil Gramm: Global Minimum Shakedown
« Reply #344 on: April 07, 2023, 03:46:11 PM »


The Global Minimum Tax Shakedown
Biden is holding Congress hostage: Impose the levy, or see foreign nations seize American profit anyway.
By Phil Gramm and Mike Solon
April 6, 2023 6:34 pm ET


The Biden administration wants to make the world safer for tax increases. That’s the message the White House has sent by enjoining the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development to agree on a new global levy. The proposal, thus far endorsed by 137 nations, imposes a 15% global minimum tax on multinational corporations with sales of over €750 million and a profits tax levied where sales are made—not where profits are reported—on companies with over $20 billion of revenue.

It isn’t difficult to figure out who would bear the brunt of this economic burden. Neither tax is calculated to include the amortization of intellectual property, and both would primarily hit American corporations, which are bigger and more profitable and own more intellectual property than their international competitors. Though a Democratic Congress rejected the tax last year, President Biden has now spearheaded the international agreement to let foreign nations tax American companies to collect the equivalent of the tax on their U.S. earnings if Congress won’t impose the tax.

The 2017 tax cut lowered America’s federal corporate tax rate from 35%, the OECD’s highest rate, to 21% in what the OECD director then described as a “race to the average.” With state corporate taxes added, the average combined U.S. rate is now 25%, slightly above the global mean of 23%. The economy grew 2.9% in 2018, the strongest growth rate in 13 years, and almost certainly would have broken 3% had the Trump administration not launched a trade war that year, which the Congressional Budget Office estimated would cost the economy some half a percentage point of economic growth.

Since corporations are nothing but legal structures, no one has ever seriously disputed the notion that corporations don’t pay taxes. If a corporation can’t pass a tax on to customers, the burden will fall on investors and workers. As expected, after the 2017 tax cuts went into effect, real wages grew 43% more in 2018 and 93% more in 2019 than the 2011-17 average increase.


Pension and mutual funds, charitable organizations and insurance companies holding equities to fund death and annuity benefits—which own some 72% of all American equities—saw their rate of return increase 22% relative to the average 2011-17 returns in the two years following the tax cuts before the pandemic. After the 2016 elections, when it became clear a tax cut was coming, until the beginning of the pandemic, equity values rose twice as fast annually as they had risen during the previous seven years. A corporate-tax increase would be expected to produce the opposite results.

When Mr. Biden took office he proposed a massive corporate-tax increase of $1.9 trillion—four times the estimated cost of the 2017 corporate-tax cuts. But the Democratic Congress rejected the proposal and adopted a dramatically smaller corporate-tax increase that raised only a fifth of the revenue set out in the president’s plan. Now facing a Republican House, the Biden administration’s only hope of raising corporate taxes is by using the OECD agreement to pressure Congress to impose the tax or see those nations that do adopt the corporate minimum tax impose additional taxes on subsidiaries of U.S. companies effectively to collect the minimum tax on their U.S. earnings. The global minimum tax is conveniently set to go into effect in 2025, after the elections and when many popular provisions of the 2017 tax cut expire.

The OECD minimum-tax agreement is estimated to collect some $236 billion in new taxes and redistribute some $200 billion of tax collections by allocating taxing authority based on where sales occur, not where profits are reported. Despite the OECD’s decade of work on the tax, the organization along with the Treasury Department claims not to know how much of this tax will be paid by U.S. companies—or, more precisely, by American investors, workers and consumers.

But the answer seems obvious since only two of the 25 top tech companies and two of the top 25 Fortune 2000 companies are based in Europe, while 18 and 13 are based in the U.S., respectively. Denying amortization of intellectual property, allocating taxing authority based on where sales are made, and imposing what amounts to an excess profits tax on very large, highly profitable companies guarantees that American companies will pay most of the tax in virtually every nation in the world where the tax is collected. The Oxford Center for Business Taxation has estimated the U.S. will pay 64% of the profits tax, compared with 9.5% for China, 3.8% for the U.K., 1.6% for Germany and 0.7% for France. Based on all available evidence it appears the burden of the corporate-minimum-tax provision will also fall primarily on U.S. corporations.

Taxing nonvoters is government’s oldest game. Yet this time the European Union, which dominates the OECD, is playing it with a willing American partner. It’s easy to understand why other countries are willing to agree to an international tax system in which Americans pay most of the taxes. But the White House’s championing of the tax reveals how committed the administration is to pushing big government everywhere and how desperate it is to raise U.S. corporate taxes.

Republicans can’t afford to stand by and let the Biden administration use an international agreement that the American people’s representatives never approved to pressure Congress to raise taxes on investors, workers and consumers. This blatant misuse of executive power cries out for Congress to repudiate the international agreement, mandate a retaliatory response to any effort by foreign nations to collect the tax on U.S. earnings, and terminate U.S. funding for the OECD until the minimum tax agreement is vitiated.

If the Biden administration can conspire with European nations to raise U.S. taxes, how long will it be before the same process imposes European environmental and regulatory policy on the U.S.? The recently exposed Federal Trade Commission “coordination” with European regulators to kill mergers that the U.S. courts wouldn’t allow the agency to stop suggests it won’t be long.

Mr. Gramm is a former chairman of the Senate Banking Committee and a nonresident senior fellow at American Enterprise Institute. Mr. Solon is an adviser of US Policy Metrics.

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RANE: A look back at the landmark SCS Ruling, 5 years on
« Reply #345 on: April 13, 2023, 05:02:56 PM »

A Look Back at a Landmark South China Sea Ruling, Five Years On
undefined and Director, Stratfor Center for Applied Geopolitics at RANE
Rodger Baker
Director, Stratfor Center for Applied Geopolitics at RANE, Stratfor
7 MIN READJul 12, 2021 | 17:34 GMT





An aerial photograph taken by the Philippine Air Force in November 2003 shows Chinese-built structures near the disputed Spratly Islands in the South China Sea.


On July 12, 2016, an international tribunal in The Hague effectively ruled that China’s sweeping nine-dash line in the South China Sea had no international legal standing under the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), siding with the Philippines. Ahead of that landmark ruling, I had the opportunity to take part in a semi-formal dialogue between researchers and officials from both the United States and China (notably, Philippine delegates were not invited). The Chinese side set the tone of the meeting. They considered the Philippine case without merit (China boycotted the tribunal), reasserted their historical claims to much of the South China Sea, and not so subtly told the United States to stay out of regional Chinese affairs. There was no dialogue. The meeting was intended to deliver a message that China would continue to assert its sovereignty over several built-up artificial islands and that it saw U.S. moves to challenge these claims or support regional counterclaimants as interference and acts of aggression against China and its core interests.

In the five years since the Permanent Court of Arbitration ruled on the case brought by the Philippines, China’s response has highlighted the challenges of maritime claims in the region, as well as the limitations of international law. Without willing compliance or international enforcement, relative power remains the true arbiter — allowing for Beijing to gain an advantage in the disputed waterway.

A Look Back

Five years on, China continues to ignore the U.N. tribunal ruling, has hardened its positions in the South China Sea, formalized its administrative claims to the territory, and expanded its maritime patrols and exercises. In part, this was facilitated by the Philippines itself. Just two months before the tribunal issued its ruling, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte took office and rapidly distanced himself from the tribunal ruling and his predecessor’s China policies. In return, Duterte sought Chinese investment and stable relations, which would enable him to focus on his domestic priorities, including his anti-drug campaign and his push for greater federalism as a way to manage the restive southern provinces.


Manila’s shift in tone regarding China also comes amid Duterte’s frequent threats to distance the Philippines from the United States, as well as end the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA), which is a 70-year-old framework under which U.S. military personnel operate in the Philippines. This means that even if the United States sought to challenge China’s claims on the basis of the tribunal ruling, Washington would find little support from the very country that had brought the case against Beijing to begin with. The negative U.S. response to Duterte’s anti-drug campaign, which was reportedly rife with extrajudicial killings, added to tensions between the two erstwhile allies. While the U.S. Navy continued to carry out Freedom of Navigation Operations (FONOPS) around the Chinese-occupied islets, it did little more to try and dislodge the Chinese forces. Tribunal ruling or not, Beijing remains the de facto controlling power over the disputed islets, and also retains control of related fishing grounds.

The Challenges of International Law

One of the frequent arguments Duterte has made for his China policy and his reluctance to press the tribunal ruling is that Manila simply does not have the capacity to enforce the ruling, and that Washington has failed to step up and shoulder the responsibility. In short, Duterte has essentially said that, while he still holds that the islands and other landmasses in the South China Sea are Philippine territory, Manila is incapable of asserting its claims, and thus it is near futile and self-defeating to undermine relations with China over something that cannot be altered any time soon.

In a similar vein, Duterte has blamed both the previous Philippine administration and the United States for failing to dislodge China in 2012, when Washington helped ease rising tensions around the disputed Scarborough Shoal. Duterte and his supporters have questioned why the United States failed to push Chinese ships out of the shoal after the Philippine ships withdrew. The crux of the argument is that, despite the U.S.-Philippine mutual defense treaty and the superiority of the U.S. Navy at the time, Washington failed to fulfill its responsibilities to its ally. Thus U.S. freedom of navigation operations (FONOPS) are disruptive and cause problems for Manila, but do not include any real benefit.

China wagered that the United States would not risk triggering a larger military engagement over a few spots of rock and sand in a distant sea.





Despite his frequent rhetorical flourishes and occasional foul language, Duterte isn’t entirely off the mark. The inconvenient reality of treaties and international law more broadly is that they are only effective so long as they are enforced or willingly adhered to, or at least perceived by third parties to be actually binding. If China truly believed that the United States would risk its own ships, aircraft and personnel to preserve Manila’s claims to the unoccupied shoals and islets, Beijing may have taken a different path. But China’s experience has led it to assess that while the United States would complain, Washington would not take on the risk of a larger military engagement with China over a few spots of rock and sand in a distant sea, no matter how strategic the overall waterway may be. And the United States reinforced this view by frequently claiming it did not take sides in the Philippines' South China Sea dispute with China, thus failing to assertively back Manila’s claims. Not only was this the longstanding U.S. policy, it also matched the tribunal ruling, which did not assess Philippine sovereignty despite rejecting China’s claims.

The Limitations of U.S. Power

The United States has long had mixed views on treaties, international law and multinational organizations. From its earliest days, U.S. leaders argued against entangling alliances, fearing that such relations could force the United States into economic or military action that would be detrimental to its own domestic interests. Like any large power, the United States has used international systems, laws and organizations when they largely fit U.S. needs and interests, but shied away when they did not. The United States has even failed to ratify UNCLOS, despite that being the basis for the tribunal ruling, as well as part of Washington’s justification for its naval operations in the South China Sea.

For much of the last three decades, even as there were growing voices urging Washington to take heed of China’s rise and its potential challenge to the U.S.-supported international order, U.S. administrations largely sought to entice Beijing through engagement, hoping China would “westernize” by default. While that idea has since lost credence, it does in part explain U.S. reticence in the past to directly challenge China, despite Beijing’s assertive behavior in the South China Sea. In more concrete terms, Washington has also felt that the risk of military escalation with China exceeded the threat posed by each incremental step China took in occupying, building up and arming the islets.

For the past 20 years, the primary U.S. security focus had been on counterterrorism efforts and on the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. Great power competition was simply not in vogue, and U.S. training cycles and force deployments reflected the prioritization of non-state actors as the primary security threat. While that pattern is now shifting rapidly, the United States is no longer in a position to prevent Chinese action. Washington must instead either manage the new reality of power in the South China Sea, or take on the cost of trying to roll back Chinese positions. It’s one thing to stop something from happening, but it’s quite another to reverse an existing reality.

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Back to UNESCO
« Reply #346 on: June 13, 2023, 03:50:46 AM »


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RANE: The Implications of Using Frozen Russian Assets to rebuild Ukraine
« Reply #348 on: August 10, 2023, 11:52:21 AM »


The Implications of Using Frozen Russian Assets To Rebuild Ukraine
undefined and Global Economy Analyst at RANE
Markus Jaeger
Global Economy Analyst at RANE, Stratfor
Aug 10, 2023 | 16:02 GMT





Rescuers use a crane to dismantle the rubble of a building destroyed by a Russian shelling on Aug. 8, 2023, in Pokrovsk, Ukraine.
Rescuers use a crane to dismantle the rubble of a building destroyed by a Russian shelling on Aug. 8, 2023, in Pokrovsk, Ukraine.
(Serhii Korovayny/Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images)

Western governments are facing mounting pressure to use the roughly $300 billion in Russian central bank assets they froze back in February 2022 to fund Ukraine's reconstruction. In late June, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said the European Union would soon outline how it intends to use proceeds from seized Russian assets for Ukraine's post-conflict recovery efforts. In the United States, lawmakers in Congress have also recently introduced bills that would grant the U.S. president the authority to confiscate Russian assets frozen within the country and allocate them to Ukraine.

Such propositions are intuitively appealing for several reasons, with the most obvious being that they'd reduce the financial burden on Kyiv's partners in rebuilding the war-torn country. From an economic and legal standpoint, expropriating Russian government assets would also help hold Moscow accountable for the destruction it has wrought on Ukraine, as well as for violating international and moral norms by invading the country. And from a strategic standpoint, it might help deter other countries from engaging in military aggression.

However, expropriating assets owned by a sovereign state is a complex issue with myriad legal, economic and strategic implications that are worth exploring as Western policymakers mull such a major decision.

Legal Challenges: International
As it stands, there are significant obstacles to expropriating state-owned foreign assets without breaching customary international law, which is wedded to the doctrine of sovereign immunity. This doctrine establishes that a state is immune from criminal prosecution and civil suit in another state's domestic courts, meaning that assets held by a foreign state cannot be expropriated based on decisions made by domestic courts.

In mulling the potential implications of Western countries paying for Ukraine's reconstruction with frozen Russian funds, some legal scholars have debated whether, in the event of a violation of international norms (in this case, Russia's invasion of Ukraine), customary international law may allow to implement extra-judicial (outside the remit of domestic courts) ''confiscatory action'' qua (in the capacity of) legal countermeasures. At the heart of this debate is the question of whether expropriating Russian government assets to help finance Ukraine's reconstruction would constitute such a countermeasure by forcing Russia to meet its legal obligation to compensate for the damages caused by its ongoing war. But while scholarly opinion differs, there appears to be a consensus that countermeasures have to be revisable and temporary. And since expropriation constitutes a permanent transfer of ownership, using Russian funds to pay for Ukraine's reconstruction would not seem to meet that definition. Moreover, by sidestepping the domestic-legal process, executive action would deprive a foreign state of due process, which may raise additional legal-procedural issues, including the violation of the rule of law.

International law does provide for exceptions to the doctrine of sovereign immunity, including expropriating state assets, in the case of a violation of international norms. But there are only two ways to procedurally establish that Russia's invasion of Ukraine constitutes such a violation. The first is the adoption of a U.N. Security Council (UNSC) resolution, which is a non-starter since Russia's permanent member status would enable it to block such a vote. The second is a favorable ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which also represents a high hurdle because the court would need to find Russia guilty of having committed genocide in order to waive the country's sovereign immunity (and so far, the ICJ has only called for Russia to cease its attack on Ukraine).

State-owned assets can also be seized in the context of a peace treaty. A country may, for example, agree to see its assets transferred into another country's ownership as part of an agreement on war reparations. This, however, requires the consent of the state whose assets are being seized — something Russia is highly unlikely to provide unless it suffers a major defeat in Ukraine, which most military analysts believe is not in the cards. But most importantly, as non-belligerents in the war, the United States and the European Union are not a party to peace negotiations and would therefore have no right to confiscate another state's assets as part of any treaty reached between Ukraine and Russia to end the conflict..

Legal Challenges: Domestic
Many states have also incorporated the doctrine of sovereign immunity into domestic law, creating further procedural-legal obstacles to seizing Russian assets. In the United States, for example, the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (1976) grants significant protections to states, though it also allows for some exceptions. Under the so-called doctrine of restricted sovereign immunity, the commercial (as opposed to strictly public) activities of a foreign state may be exempted from sovereign immunity. This means that state-owned commercial assets can in principle become the subject of domestic litigation and expropriation, while a presidential aircraft, for example, may not. The legal hurdles are high even when it comes to attaching commercial assets, but they are not necessarily impossible to surmount. Nevertheless, U.S. courts have consistently shielded foreign states' holdings of foreign-exchange reserves from domestic commercial litigation, most recently in the case of creditor litigation against the government of Argentina. This would seem to put the expropriation of $200-300 billion worth of Russian central bank foreign-exchange holdings beyond the reach of commercial litigation.

Per U.S. domestic law, property taken in violation of international law may also be exempt from sovereign immunity. And a foreign state can waive its immunity. In the United States, a foreign state that has been designated as a sponsor of terrorism may also not benefit from sovereign immunity, possibly making foreign-exchange holdings subject to attachment. The U.S. Terrorism Risk Insurance Act (2002), for example, allows plaintiffs seeking to enforce terrorism-related judgments compensatory damages, including from a foreign state. But the U.S. government has not designated Russia a state sponsor of terrorism, legally sharply circumscribing this avenue when it comes to using frozen Russian funds to pay for Ukraine's reconstruction.

In the United States, state-owned assets can also be seized in the event of a state engaging in armed conflict with another state. Under the U.S. International Emergency Economic Powers Act (1977), the federal government is authorized to block and immobilize foreign assets, but the United States can only expropriate assets if it's engaged in armed conflict with another country. Under this law, the United States would have to declare war on Russia before it could seize Russian assets.

Current U.S. domestic law could, of course, be reformed to allow for the use of frozen Russian funds in Ukraine's reconstruction. Congress would probably have to pass a new law, authorizing the expropriation (as opposed to the mere blocking of) Russian assets. This would violate international law, but it could certainly be done, unless the Supreme Court takes a different view.

But the European Union will find it difficult to agree on a common position, in part due to these various legal obstacles. The European Commission appears to be keen on expropriating Russian assets, but the European Central Bank (ECB) and various member states are not. The ECB is worried about the potential real-world consequences of weakening the rule of law, such as damaging the euro's attractiveness and increasing the risk of financial instability.

Some EU member states like Germany are concerned that if the weakening of sovereign immunity were to become a general trend, it might be exposed to World War II-related lawsuits. To the extent that these legal issues make the various relevant actors reluctant to weaken sovereign immunity in order to facilitate the expropriation of state assets, agreeing on a joint EU position towards expropriating Russian state assets will be difficult. While adherents of realpolitik argue that legal norms do not constrain state behavior, the existence of such norms does create procedural-institutional and political obstacles to expropriation.

Economic Implications
Seizing another state's assets also has economic-financial consequences. For the United States and its European allies, seizing Russian state assets would limit the call on their own resources in funding Ukraine's reconstruction. But it might also expose Western countries to financial retaliation and concomitant financial losses — especially those with greater foreign private investment in Russia.

Admittedly, Russia has already imposed a policy of ''indirect expropriation'' by requiring foreign companies to pay an exit tax to finance the war efforts or lock up the proceeds for an extended period of time before they can be transferred. More recently, Russia has expropriated foreign companies outright without paying compensation. But if the West decides to use frozen Russian assets to pay for Ukraine's reconstruction, Russia may decide to expropriate assets held by foreigners, which would primarily affect private investors. Even if the U.S. government holds no assets in Russia, U.S. companies could still become subject to retaliation, possibly causing a domestic political backlash.

In the short-to-medium term, the economic costs would likely be manageable — especially if the United States, the euro area, Japan, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia act jointly. But expropriating Russian government assets may diminish demand for U.S. and European financial assets, including by third parties concerned about the potential erosion of the rule of law and sovereign immunity. But admittedly, even if this happens, the economic costs may be quite manageable.

Strategic Implications
The outright or even indirect expropriation of government-owned foreign assets would have consequences at the strategic level as well. For a start, it would make the Russian government even more reluctant to reach a compromise to end its war in Ukraine, which would then require greater resources for Kyiv to decisively prevail on the battlefield to impose a punitive peace, including the forfeiture of Russia's foreign asset holdings. Leaving aside the question of how desirable a punitive peace might be, outright expropriation would remove the option of holding foreign assets ''at risk'' and of using them as a bargaining chip in getting Russian to sign a peace agreement. Admittedly, the geopolitical interests that initially provoked the conflict in Ukraine will much more strongly influence whether a peace deal is reached compared with a few hundred billion dollars worth of foreign assets. But freezing rather than seizing those Russian assets might make it easier to reach a peace agreement.

In this context, an important distinction needs to be drawn between the legal protections afforded to assets owned by a state, and those afforded to assets owned by another state's companies or individuals. Under international law, private foreign ownership of domestic financial and real assets does not benefit from immunity, making them subject to domestic law and hence expropriation. However, the state is obligated to compensate the owners of the expropriated assets. The World Bank's Investor-State Dispute Settlement, for example, provides for arbitration in case of dispute and can award plaintiffs damages, even though it has no power to enforce these claims. (International investment treaties weaken state sovereignty by providing for a dispute settlement mechanism that allows private foreign investors to pursue legal claims against a host state, including expropriation and discriminatory treatment.) But in case of criminal activity (like sanctions violations), assets owned by foreign legal or private persons can become subject to expropriation without compensation, though this can generally be challenged by the party subject to expropriation in the domestic courts.

Expropriating private-sector assets would also mean reducing the Western countries' ability to influence the attitudes of Russian private economic actors as the prospect of regaining assets may make the private sector more inclined to favor a resolution of the conflict. Finally, from a tactical point of view, expropriating Russian assets would also do little to weaken Russia's ability to prosecute the war, relative to a scenario where the assets are merely frozen.

A Complex Calculus
Seizing (or expropriating) assets is fundamentally different from blocking (or freezing) assets. Mindful of the legal obstacles and reputational consequences of outright expropriation, some observers have proposed imposing a windfall tax on profits linked to Russian assets, as well as schemes to invest Russian assets to generate higher yields and then channel the excess returns into Ukrainian reconstruction efforts. The former would undoubtedly qualify as ''indirect expropriation'' by treating Russian holdings differently from the holdings of other states. The latter would be risky, as higher-risk investments might go bad, forcing governments and taxpayers to compensate the Russian government for any losses. Both proposals would create reputational costs for limited financial gains. For Western policymakers, it will thus be a question of whether the potential political-economic costs of expropriation outweigh the potential benefits.

From Washington and Brussels' viewpoint, there is no doubt that territorial integrity is an international norm worth defending by penalizing those who violate it, at least in the hopes of deterring potential future violators. Economically, it is also no doubt desirable to limit the financial resources Western countries will need to mobilize to rebuild Ukraine. For Western decision-makers, the question is whether expropriating Russian assets is the best and most cost-effective way to achieve these goals, all risks and benefits considered.

Crafty_Dog

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