MARY ALEXANDER • 18 JULY 2024

“It turns out that the World Health Organization, in its founding document (1946), EXEMPTED itself from criminal prosecution,” reads a claim circulating on social media in South Africa and elsewhere since 8 July 2024.*

It includes a one-minute video of UK comedian and known conspiracist Russell Brand interviewing US financial analyst and known conspiracist David Martin.

Brand asks Martin why he claims the WHO is a “criminal cartel” and “how the events of the last few years somehow demonstrate or at least utilise that”.

Martin responds: “In the founding document of the World Health Organization, they gave themselves the right to be exempt from all criminal prosecution of any kind whatsoever.”

He adds: “Why would an organisation need to give itself exemption from criminal prosecution? This is not civil prosecution, this is criminal prosecution …”

The reason “they wrote that into their founding charter”, Martin says, “is because they knew they were already breaking the law”.

Throughout the video, a clipped page of the WHO’s supposed “founding document” is displayed on screen as proof of Martin’s claim. It includes a URL to the page https://apps.who.int/gb/bd/pdf_files/BD_49th-en.pdf#page=34. That’s page 34.

The page is headed: “CONVENTION ON PRIVILEGES AND IMMUNITIES. Article V – Representatives of Members”.

It reads:

Representatives of members at meetings convened by a specialized agency shall, while exercising their functions and during their journeys to and from the place of meeting, enjoy the following privileges and immunities:
(a) Immunity from personal arrest or detention and from seizure of their personal baggage, and in respect of words spoken or written and all acts done by them in their official capacity, immunity from legal process of every kind;

But the page isn’t part of the WHO’s “founding document”, and doesn’t “exempt” the WHO from “criminal prosecution”.

Convention passed by UN general assembly in 1947

If Martin had looked just four pages up to https://apps.who.int/gb/bd/pdf_files/BD_49th-en.pdf#page=30 (that’s page 30) he would have found that the section of text he refers to is not the WHO’s “founding document”.

Instead, it’s the text of a United Nations treaty, the Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the Specialized Agencies, adopted by the UN general assembly on 21 November 1947.

The treaty applies to all of the UN’s 17 specialised agencies. The WHO is just one of those 17.

The others include the Food and Agriculture Organization, the International Atomic Energy Agency, the International Seabed Authority, the International Telecommunication Union and the World Meteorological Organization.

All the treaty does is grant what is essentially diplomatic immunity to representatives of the UN’s specialised agencies, as international organisations. This means that officials from one country who travel to or live in another country are not subject to the laws of the second country. It is an ancient principle of international law.

The PDF Martin refers to is also not the WHO’s “founding document”. It’s simply a collection of essential WHO texts put together under the title “Basic Documents.”. It includes the WHO’s constitution, agreements with other intergovernmental organisations, rules and regulations, and more.

By “the events of the last few years”, Brand is clearly referring to the Covid pandemic. Both he and Martin are proponents of the disproved “plandemic” conspiracy theory, which holds that the pandemic was somehow planned by the WHO and other shadowy elites.

But in the video, Martin doesn’t explain how the WHO was “already breaking the law” back in 1947.

If the treaty text Martin refers to is proof that the WHO is a “criminal cabal”, then all other UN agencies are too – including, for example, the International Seabed Authority.

Read more: Russell Brand – Confidence man

* Some Facebook and Instagram users may have deleted their posts after Meta’s Third-Party Fact-Checking Program rated their claims as untrue.

Published by Africa Check on 13 August 2024

The post No ‘founding document’ gives WHO exemption from ‘criminal prosecution’ appeared first on South Africa Gateway.