Global Governance vs. Democratic Sovereignty

Global Governance vs. Democratic Sovereignty
by Ramesh Thakur at Brownstone Institute

On 27 May 2022, Carl Bildt, the former prime minister (PM) of Sweden, wrote: ‘The pandemic offers important lessons for managing future challenges, particularly climate change’, which ‘warrants urgent attention.’ In chapter 12 of Our Enemy, the Government, I described ten points that climate change and pandemic management policies have in common on their respective agendas:

1. The claim to represent The Science™ on the basis of an artificially manufactured scientific consensus;
2. A mismatch between abstract mathematical and computer models and hard data and evidence;
3. The deliberate spreading of fear and panic in the population as a means to grab attention and spur drastic political action;
4. In order to sustain the scientific consensus, the exaggeration of supporting evidence, discrediting of contrary evidence, silencing of sceptical voices, and marginalisation and mockery of dissenters;
5. The enormous expansion of powers for the nanny state that bosses citizens and businesses because governments know best and can pick winners and losers, yet in practice, a record of overpromising and underdelivering;
6. Framing the agenda as primarily a moral crusade and dissent and noncompliance as immoral;
7. Widening inequality between the laptop class ‘everywheres’ and the working class ‘nowheres,’ or the ‘have yachts’ versus the ‘have nots;’
8. Hypocrisy, meaning the mismatch in the behaviour of the exalted elites who preach to the deplorables the proper etiquette of abstinence to deal with the emergency, and their own insouciant exemption from a restrictive lifestyle;
9. The disconnect between industrialised and developing countries in responsibility for the crisis and the distribution of costs for addressing it;
10. The rise of the international technocratic elite in a de facto alliance with national governing, bureaucratic, scientific, and corporate elites.

The World Court Delivers a Weighty Opinion

A recent pronouncement from the World Court adds another link to the chain that connects climate change to pandemic management policies. International organisations are taking over an increasing range of functions from the governments of states, posing a threat both to national sovereignty and to democracy with national bureaucrats working in tandem with international technocrats – the lanyard class – to overrule citizens’ choices. With unelected and unaccountable judges displacing elected governments as the real rulers, judicial overreach is emerging as a threat to the democratic nation-state.

Over the past two decades, climate activists have essentially adopted a smug ‘We’ve won’ tone on a three-part ‘scientific consensus’ on adverse impacts of rising CO2, human activity being primarily responsible for the rise in emissions, and the imminence of climate catastrophe without urgent drastic action. 

All three parts have come under attack in recent times. Many serious scientists have always been sceptical of the ‘Science is settled’ claim on the unique rise in harmful emissions caused by the fossil-fuel driven industrial revolution. More and more have begun to speak out on the growing panic over a climate emergency. Their response to climate catastrophisation can be summarised succinctly as ‘Rubbish!,’ albeit expressed in more polite and scientifically neutral language. The doom merchants have a three-decade long catastrophic record on predictions of catastrophes. The World Climate Declaration issued two years ago has been signed by 2,000 experts from 60 countries.

In the meantime, there’s been public awakening, rising resentment, and firming opposition to the questionable assumptions, significant harms, and outright futility of climate targets encapsulated in the slogan Net Zero – in an age when slogans are mistaken for sound and fully costed policy. Consequently many Western governments have begun to backtrack, none more so than the Trump administration that also recognises the strategic folly of climate policies that have demonstrably failed to end global reliance on fossil fuels, added to energy costs while making supply increasingly less reliable, and transferred wealth and industrial might to China.

Faced with growing expressions of scientific doubt, public backlash, and policy reversals, activists have switched from trying to persuade governments to weaponising the courts to force compliance with their agenda. Article 92 of the United Nations Charter describes the International Court of Justice (ICJ, commonly called the World Court) as the UN’s ‘principal judicial organ’ and all member states are automatically parties to the ICJ. Chapter IV of its Statute, which is annexed to the UN Charter, deals with Advisory Opinions. Article 96 of the Charter stipulates that the General Assembly may request the ICJ ‘to give an advisory opinion on any legal question’ or authorise another UN body to seek one.

In 2021, inspired by the youth group Pacific Island Students Fighting Climate Change, Vanuatu launched a campaign for an advisory opinion. On 29 March 2023, the UN General Assembly requested an advisory opinion from the ICJ on the legal obligations and liability of states on climate change. On 23 July, the court published its Advisory Opinion. Relying primarily on IPCC reports which ‘constitute the best available science on the causes, nature and consequences of climate change’ that calls to mind New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern’s demand that her Department of Health was to be the ‘single source of truth’ on Covid, and on the widespread acknowledgment of the adverse effects of climate change across the UN system (paragraph 74), the court concluded that climate change is ‘an urgent and existential threat’ (73).

Intersection with the WHO’s Pandemic Management Agenda

The ICJ advisory on climate liability intersects with the issue of democratic sovereignty vis-à-vis the WHO on five points. First, falling trust in the competence, integrity, and truthfulness of public institutions and media has had a flow-on effect in a new willingness to question other policy domains, including climate change and net zero. 

In turn this has triggered a growth in support for radical ethnonationalism that is being tapped by populist centre-right parties. ‘Preference falsification’ is a concept that previously was invoked with reference to authoritarian regimes. It denotes the condition where individuals conceal their true preferences in order to conform to official and/or societal pressure. A good example is this anonymous (of course) online comment on the viciously contested issue of trans vs. women’s rights: ‘We live in a period of human history where the thoughtful and the intelligent must stay silent for fear of offending the fragile and the stupid.’ Many everyday folks support the rights of women to have their own spaces without wishing any harm upon trans people quietly living and enjoying their lives, but dare not risk saying so openly for fear of losing their job, expulsion from their friendship group, or social media pile-on.

To ensure that such an outcome aligns with official policy preferences, governments engage in narrative management whereby a false impression is deliberately fostered of scientific consensus, the policy option is said to be based in that agreed science, and imbued with moralism to the point of sacralization. This is the Covid lesson that Bildt was alluding to. For it to succeed and the illusion of consensus and moralism maintained, any scepticism and criticism by scientists and dissenting voices among the commentariat and the public must be suppressed and the dissenters punished. 

They must not be permitted to realise that there is a significant group of others who share their dissenting point of view, let alone that they might even constitute a silent (because they have been silenced by censorship and coercion) majority. But when enough people do realise, a tipping point is reached that generates a preference cascade. 

Once this happened with Covid, people were more receptive to the idea that governments lie to survive and maintain control over people. We now see the dam breaking, for example, on the criminal consequences and other economic and social pathologies of the long eulogised mass immigration in the UK, Europe, and US.

Third, the ICJ justified its conclusion on the reasoning that the ‘adverse effects of climate change’ such as rising sea levels, drought, desertification, and natural disasters, ‘may significantly impair the enjoyment of certain human rights,’ including ‘the right to health’ (379). 

The ‘most significant primary obligation to prevent significant harm to the climate system and other parts of the environment…applies to all States, including those that are not parties to one or more of the climate change treaties’ (409, emphasis added).

Fourth, the opinion is not binding but will shape climate governance around the world in myriad ways in the years to come in academia, courts, bureaucracies, and civil society. Vanuatu’s special envoy on climate change, Ralph Regenvanu, believes that the ICJ opinion will shift discussions from one of ‘voluntary commitments’ to reduce emissions, to one about binding obligations under international law. It will embolden activist courts and judges around the world who are committed to the climate crusade. The logic underpinning the advisory prepares the ground for individual liability, speech restrictions, and legal intimidation.

This exact same argument applies with respect to the compliance pull of the pandemic accords. In general, legal norms are more effective in regulating state behaviour. But in specific instances, a particular law may be breached while a political norm shapes a decision – on acts of commission or omission – through a calculation of reputational costs. 

On mass atrocity crimes, for example, the 1948 Genocide Convention imposes legal obligations on states to act. By contrast, the 2005 Responsibility to Protect (R2P) principle is a global political norm that creates a moral responsibility but no legal duty on outside states to prevent and halt atrocities. However, even R2P has to be interpreted and applied in the broader context of binding obligations on states under national, international, humanitarian, and human rights laws.

The pandemic accords’ legal effect will lie in strengthening the Pandemic Prevention and Preparedness Treaty and One Health as global norms. In combination with the amended International Health Regulations IHR) that come into force next month for most states unless they had opted out in July, and which must and will be read in parallel with the Pandemic Treaty, the political reality is that member states will be enmeshed into the international pandemic management framework led by international technocrats.

In the 15 World Court judges’ unanimous opinion, climate obligations are legal, substantive, and enforceable, not just aspirational. Previously vague obligations have been elevated to binding duties under customary international law to prevent significant environmental harm and cooperate internationally to uphold fundamental human rights in the face of escalating climate risks. Yet, all governments engage in policy trade-offs involving economic goals, development assistance, and energy security that triangulates emissions, affordability, and reliability. Who exactly will enforce the ICJ opinion on the geopolitical heavyweights like China, Russia, and America?

Of course, WHO recommendations are not legally binding obligations on treaty signatories. The treaty explicitly states that nothing in it gives the WHO or the Director General ‘any authority to direct, order, alter, or otherwise prescribe’ any policy; ‘or to mandate or…impose any requirements’ that states parties ‘take specific actions’ like travel bans, vaccination mandates, or lockdowns (Article 22.2). 

However, nothing in the Covid experience inspires confidence about the willingness and capacity of political leaders to resist WHO recommendations in this global institutional milieu. But if by some mistake they should do so, public health activists could seek an advisory opinion from the World Court that the health of no country’s citizens is safe unless that of the citizens of all countries is safe and therefore every state, including non-signatories of the pandemic accords, incurs a legal responsibility of compliance. Failure to do so will leave a country exposed to claims for restitution from those who may have been harmed.

The US as the Counterweight to both Globalist Agendas

The final connecting link between the net-zero and pandemic accords agendas is the critical role of the Trump administration, owing to the US normative weight and geopolitical heft in the design and management of world order, in resisting the effort to impose a tyranny of global governance on democratic nation states. 

On 29 July the US Department of Energy issued a report that rejects the core tenets of climate alarmism, notes that US policies will ‘have undetectably small direct impacts on the global climate,’ and insists that the dominant energy systems deserve to be celebrated for their role in ‘the rise of human flourishing over the past two centuries.’ Accordingly, the US is set to revoke many restrictive climate regulations in the push for continued global energy dominance. 

The previously smug climate activists reacted with fury. A New York Times article on 31 July quoted climate scientists who attacked the report for using ‘cherry-picked’ data to support a ‘scattershot collection of oft-debunked skeptic claims’ in ‘a coordinated, full-scale attack on the science.’ To have attracted such flak, the DOE report must be over the target.

On 21 January, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to withdraw the US from the WHO. The US withdrawal from the IHR was announced jointly by Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Secretary of State Marco Rubio on 18 July. In explaining the decision in a video message, Kennedy said: ‘The first reason is national sovereignty.’ Nations that ‘accept the new regulations are signing over their power in health emergencies,’ or even when confronting nebulous ‘potential public health risks,’ to ‘an unelected international organization that could order lockdowns, travel restrictions, or any other measures it sees fit.’ 

Kennedy acknowledged that the US, given its powerful position in the world, could ‘simply ignore the WHO.’ But few others are in this position of luxury. Consequently: ‘Even though many of these amendments are phrased to be non-binding, as a practical matter, it’s hard for many countries to resist them, especially when they are dependent on the WHO funding and its partnerships.’ The need, therefore, is not to rush into a new global health framework absent ‘a thorough public debate,’ Kennedy said, but to ‘strengthen national and local autonomy to hold global organizations in check and to restore a real balance of power.’

Global Governance vs. Democratic Sovereignty
by Ramesh Thakur at Brownstone Institute – Daily Economics, Policy, Public Health, Society