This is a deeply regressive measure that reverses the progression of international humanitarian law and the common law towards respect for bodily integrity; and the recognition that that respect requires the protection of the right to informed consent and the absence of coercion.
Compulsory vaccination is not unknown in this country - it was tried in the 19th century at a time when the poor were expected to know their place and that place was set by Poor Law Guardians. Aside from the effect on their bodily integrity and dignity, it was not a success.
But it was the 20th century that unveiled what medical professionals can do when unchecked by the protection of the dignity of the human person and his right to bodily integrity.
The Nuremberg Code was primarily addressed at informed consent before participating in medical experiments-as one would expect after the horrors of Mengele. But the application of the principle to the ethical necessity of informed consent to all treatment was obvious & necessary.
Given that these vaccines have been given emergency authorisation and not a full licence, because they have yet to complete the testing protocols necessary for licensed medication, the Nuremberg Code has direct application.
But the necessary extension of the principle of informed consent has been recognised in domestic caselaw, the caselaw of the European Convention of Human Rights and in authoritative declarations of international humanitarian law.
See, respectively, R (Wilkinson) v Broadmoor Special Hospital Authority and others ([2002] 1 WLR 419, Glass v United Kingdom (2004) 39 EHRR 341 and the The Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights 2005, which includes this Article:
See also the emphatic finding of the Supreme Court in Montgomery v Lanarkshire Health Board [2015] UKSC 11, which I have summarised thus:
Ultimately, this is a matter of respect for the human person. To coerce any person into accepting medical treatment against her will is abhorrent and an attack on her dignity as a human being. That includes where treatment is required as a condition of her employment.
It is difficult to think of any greater coercion.
And, as I summarise in this thread, it is not a public policy decision that is grounded in logic.
Hermer betrays a lack of understanding about the constitution & how it ensures democratic accountability: of Ministers to Parliament & of Parliament to the people.
Compliance with international obligations is a matter for Ministers alone. The AG advises them-directly. No more. 🧵
(Link below: )
International *obligations* are obligations on states. It is for a state - here, the Crown acting through Ministers - to decide how it complies with its international obligations, accepting the *international* consequences if it does not.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/…
And that can and may often include *whether* to comply with those obligations.
International obligations have no impact on domestic law for good reason. Only Parliament in its fullest sense - as a legislator - can make domestic law directly.
Not quite. The key problems are the Terms of Reference, the failure to grant core participant status to any group challenging lockdowns and of the chair and counsel to scrutinise the evidence.
Lawyers aren’t purporting to be experts. They just aren’t asking the right questions.
And that they aren’t is in large part (although not only) because of the Terms of Reference and the lack of an adversarial process through cross-examination of experts by participants with different perspectives.
With vanishingly few exceptions, the only difference in perspective allowed has been between ‘lockdown’ and ‘lockdown earlier and harder’.
This is not only reasonable but contemplated by the H. Rts Act, where legsl’n interferes with Conv’n rights in the opinion of domestic cts or Strasbourg. The courts can only make a declaration of incompatibility where the law cannot be constructed compatibly with Conv’n rights.
And, while there is a duty to construct legislation compatibly with Convention rights (as considered to apply by domestic courts or Strasbourg jurisprudence) where it is possible to do so, Parliament can then legislate so that it is impossible for the courts to do anything but follow their direction, even if incompatible with the courts’ jurisprudence on Convention rights.
This was the formulation Derry Irvine and others created in the HRA 1998, preserving Parliamentary sovereignty and allowing a creative tension between Parliament, Strasbourg and the domestic courts. The idea of human rights ‘coming home’ was not to cut Parliament out but to entrench it as part of the process.
The government’s tobacco Bill is not just stunningly impractical and unjustified by the harm that smoking causes to society, rather than the individual. It is sinister. To require adults to prove their age (not that they have reached adulthood) to buy a legal product is a gross intrusion in to individual privacy and autonomy.
It has preposterous results, such as the two 25 year-olds (then 35, 45…), a day apart in age, one of whom will commit a *criminal offence* by buying a product available to the other. (Again, not comparable to an age limit based on an assessment of maturity that is reached, only once, by all.)
It would create a thoroughly dangerous precedent that the state may ban a product not because of its capacity to do immediate grave harm (eg poisons) or to cause disorder or other societal mischief (eg alcohol, if we were being honest) but because of long-term health risks.
I acted in a judicial review of this decsn in 2021. Regardless of whether the court rightly rejected the challenge to the decision of the Sec of State, as a matter of record the JCVI did not recommend vaccination for 11-15s as there was insufficient evidence about their safety.
The reason why the Chief Medical Officers of the UK and devolved nations (‘the CMOs’) recommended overruling them was astonishingly flimsy - that they might save a (proportionately) tiny number of school days in absences by reducing the number of children getting Covid.
In making that decision, the CMOs *expressly* decides not to measure that against the accepted certainty of absences due to side-effects of the vaccine. Even only taking into account minor side effects (cold like symptoms) these were likely to be greater than absences from Covid.
An improvement on indications of Lady Hallett’s thinking,but it misses central points.
Lockdowns weren’t considered in pandemic plans not just b’cs they were unthinkable but bc’s measures *less* draconian were found to be ineffective & disproportionate.
It *is* positive that the Inquiry is finally addressing the lack of any adequate prior consideration of the exceptional harm that wld be the inevitable consequence of lockdown; let alone to weigh whether that harm was justified by the supposed efficacy of lockdown.
(I say finally because of the consummate lack of any such consideration in the terms of reference and earlier openings.)