Ordo Iuris against extending the competences of the European Union in the field of health protection

Adobe Stock

· The Ordo Iuris Institute has provided the European Commission with a legal opinion on a new EU initiative to protect global health.

· The project, which is planned to be adopted still in 2022, implements an agenda identical to the WHO pandemic treaty and the proposals of the Conference on the Future of Europe.

· The actions for health announced by the European Commission include access to abortion and global health policy governance.

· In addition to critical remarks, the Institute also made suggestions for positive action that the EU could take under the new strategy.

The EU Strategic Framework for World Health, which the Institute has previously informed about, seems to be one of the most important projects for the European Commission this year. The announced, unusually high pace of adopting the initiative (still in 2022) and further work testify to the rush of the Commission, but also suggest that the main draft strategy on global health has already been prepared, and the work on it correlates in time with the controversial project of the so-called WHO pandemic treaty. Also in numerous recommendations of the Conference on the Future of Europe, EU officials repeatedly referred to health issues, including calling for the extension of the EU's competences in this area.

The initiative processed by the European Commission envisages, inter alia, the Union's commitment to "equality in health, including women's health", which points to the promotion of abortion. The Commission also calls for recognition of the interconnection "between humans, animals and plants and their shared environment". This goes hand in hand with the assumptions of the so-called the anti-pandemic treaty of the World Health Organization, which also provides for the introduction of central public health management.

For this reason, in the opinion submitted to the European Commission, the Ordo Iuris Institute pointed to the departure of the initiative's draft from real public health problems in the world, recalling that in 2010 the EU was able to accurately diagnose such problems. As part of the new initiative, in place of previous proposals related to e.g. greater access to primary health care, there were demands to implement pro-abortion UN recommendations or to globalize and centralize management in cases similar to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In its opinion, the Institute also formulated positive proposals for actions that the EU could take under the announced strategy. These included preventing the influence of the pharmaceutical lobby in relation to drug supply chains and their strategic pooling, as well as reforming the curriculum in medical professions, which would improve the working conditions of doctors and, at the same time, limit the possibility of their work outside the state that financed their medical education .