Grasping ambition, hubris and a failed Covid legacy should trigger a reassessment of the UK's relationship with this failing organisation

The original timeline presented by the WHO had envisaged a final text of the proposed IHR amendments – where many of the most contentious proposals reside – being published before 27 January 2024, with a view to their adoption taking place at the World Health Assembly meeting scheduled from 27 May to 1 June 2024, alongside adoption of the proposed new Pandemic Treaty. That timeline, although tight, would have allowed four months for negotiators to brief domestic stakeholders, for national legislatures to debate the combined proposals, and for any necessary pre-adoption formalities (approvals, technical scrutiny, cost/benefit analyses, etc) to be completed prior to a vote at the WHA meeting in May.

We understand that the IHR Working Group anticipates a final text being settled only during April or possibly even into May, but there remains no official deadline for it to publish that final text. They refuse to confirm what the documents say, and they refuse to say when they will reveal those documents. If any further evidence were needed of the disregard and disrespect for democratic process and the sovereignty of national parliaments now alleged of the WHO, then surely this is it.

That corrosive secrecy, opacity...means Parliament will have scant opportunity to scrutinise the IHR amendments, and the new international funding and resource-sharing commitments enshrined in the parallel Pandemic Treaty. Yet these are documents with the potential to impact materially on the UK’s ability to act autonomously, on freedom of speech and opinion, on health security and on the nature of UK democracy itself. They also have the potential to commit future generations to very significant public spending obligations.

The current nature of the WHO’s funding, 85% of which now comes from private commercially-interested organisations, creates an additional imperative for rigorous, investigative scrutiny: in November 2023 Human Rights Watch wrote that "the draft [treaty] reflects a process disproportionately guided by corporate demands and the policy positions of high-income governments seeking to protect the power of private actors in health including the pharmaceutical industry".