Here I attempt to lay out the basic case against the ‘vaccination certificates’ currently suggested, by various people, for everything from international travel to shopping. These proposals differ qualitatively as well as in degree.
Not a driving licence
Justifying comparisons along the lines of driving licences or hard hats do not resolve the issue, because there is a qualitative difference: this is not a proficiency test or a piece of clothing, it is a medical procedure.
That medical procedures require the explicit and free consent of the individual concerned, is accepted by legal authorities and international bodies. The National Health Service website clarifies British law:
“a person must give permission before they receive any type of medical treatment, test or examination”. Such consent must be voluntary, meaning “the decision to either consent or not to consent to treatment must be made by the person, and must not be influenced by pressure from medical staff, friends or family”.
The European Convention on Human Rights, Article 2, protects a right to private life: “1. Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.”
It has been argued, and apparently assumed in ECHR judgements, that this encompasses “the right to be free from non-consensual medical treatment or examination”.
The Council of Europe (Resolution 2361, January 27th 2021), in a resolution mainly concerned with ensuring high take-up of COVID-19 vaccines, also declared that Member States should:
7.3.1. ensure that citizens are informed that the vaccination is NOT mandatory and that no one is politically, socially, or otherwise pressured to get themselves vaccinated, if they do not wish to do so themselves;
7.3.2. ensure that no one is discriminated against for not having been vaccinated, due to possible health risks or not wanting to be vaccinated;
(and also)
7.1.5. …[should] put in place independent vaccine compensation programmes to ensure compensation for undue damage and harm resulting from vaccination
The Council of Europe is not (of course) the EU, but the international body of 47 states of which the European Court of Human Rights, which enforces the European Convention on Human Rights, is part. Great Britain is a signatory to the ECHR and a member of the Council of Europe.
The United Nations Conventions on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, Art.25(d) states that “health professionals [must] provide care of the same quality to persons with disabilities as to others, including on the basis of free and informed consent”, which assumes that free consent is a right of people in general.
The Nuremberg code is not directly applicable, since it specifies medical experimentation rather than treatment.
Exceptions exist when a person lacks the mental capacity to consent to treatment. These carefully-limited conditions do not, as far as I know, include refusal of treatment as itself demonstrating incapacity.
Medical treatment, being an intervention in a person’s body, her very self, must be freely consented to. And all the conventions, principles and laws that prioritise consent assume that consent must be free: which means there must not be threats made in case of refusal; there must not be overbearing levels of persuasion, or emotional blackmail. The National Health Service’s current emphasis is that there must be no pressure from friends or family. It does not mention Government or an employer, presumably because hitherto it would not have occurred to anyone that that needed to be said.
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