- WHO pandemic treaty compliance may be forced on non-signatory nations using a 2025 ICJ climate ruling precedent, warns former UN official.
- The ICJ opinion finding all states have binding duties to prevent environmental harm could apply to global health obligations.
- Legal experts argue this logic could pressure countries that opted out of WHO pandemic accords to follow them anyway.
- The WHO Pandemic Agreement was adopted May 20 with 124 votes but 11 abstentions amid disputes over sovereignty and process.
- UN special rapporteur language criminalizing climate misinformation could be used to restrict pandemic dissent and free speech.
The international legal precedent set by a 2025 International Court of Justice advisory opinion on climate liability could be used to pressure countries into complying with World Health Organization pandemic agreements even if they never signed them, according to a former United Nations assistant secretary-general.
Professor Ramesh Thakur of Australian National University argues the ICJ's central finding — that states carry binding duties to prevent environmental harm regardless of which treaties they have joined — sets a legal template that could just as easily apply to global health policy. The ruling, issued in response to a 2023 United Nations General Assembly request, held that states failing to prevent environmental harm can be held liable for restitution to those affected.
Thakur warns this logic could extend to pandemic accords, potentially forcing compliance on nations that opted out of the WHO's amended International Health Regulations and its newly adopted Pandemic Agreement, which 124 countries approved on May 20.
A troubling precedent for health sovereignty
Thakur's reasoning centers on how the ICJ justified its ruling: the court found that the effects of climate change threaten a range of human rights, including the right to health, and that the resulting duty to prevent harm binds every state, even those that never joined a climate treaty. Thakur argues the same logic could be replayed for pandemics, letting activists seek a future ICJ opinion holding that no country's health is secure unless every country's is — and that non-signatory nations therefore owe the same legal compliance as those who signed on.
Expanding the playbook from climate to health
Thakur draws a parallel between the two crises, arguing that both the COVID-19 and climate responses were driven by model-based predictions and claims of scientific authority that hardened into moral crusades, expanding state power at the expense of individual and business freedom. He writes that this dynamic produced attacks on dissenting experts and critics, dismissed in the name of protecting a supposed scientific consensus.
Thakur cites Vanuatu's special climate envoy, Ralph Regenvanu, who has said the ICJ ruling will push climate diplomacy away from voluntary emissions pledges and toward binding legal obligations — a shift Thakur believes will embolden courts sympathetic to climate activism and could do the same for pandemic policy.
A disputed vote and familiar objections
The WHO Pandemic Agreement was adopted May 20 with 124 votes in favor, zero against, and 11 abstentions, including Poland, Russia, Italy, Iran, and Slovakia. The United States, which has begun withdrawing from the WHO, was among 46 countries not present for the vote. The vote itself was conducted by a show of hands rather than a recorded ballot, and the official tally has been disputed: the chair's count treated abstaining countries as though they had voted in favor, a discrepancy critics say underscores the opacity of the process.
The agreement includes provisions for pathogen sample sharing, vaccine distribution frameworks, international surveillance systems, compliance with WHO emergency declarations, and digital health certification systems.
Critics, including the 11 abstaining nations, cited the loss of national sovereignty, unclear legal language, and the risk of unelected bodies dictating policy, according to reporting from The Exposé. Thakur adds that eroding public trust in institutions since COVID-19 has fed rising support for right-leaning parties opposed to globalist encroachment on national sovereignty.
Implications for free speech and dissent
Thakur points to a report presented by UN Special Rapporteur on human rights and climate change Elisa Morgera to the Human Rights Council on June 30, 2025, which called for criminalizing those spreading misinformation and disinformation about climate change — language he argues could just as easily be aimed at pandemic dissent.
He argues the ICJ's reasoning lays groundwork for individual liability and speech restrictions that could apply equally to pandemic policy, since the same pressure to comply with international health guidance would apply.
Thakur closes by noting that nothing about the COVID-19 experience gives him confidence that political leaders would resist WHO recommendations if a similar legal case were made.
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