UKCAF website

Government plans to ignore Human Rights violation over water fluoridation.

The Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights last week revealed to UKCAF that it will allow the Health and Social Care Bill to pass through Parliament without challenging the government’s power to impose fluoridation, despite its blatant violation of the European Convention on Human Rights.

Doug Cross
8th February 2012

Why are government Ministers appointed to manage fields in which they have no professional competence?

Followers of Parliamentary debate may recall the astonishing claim in the Lords last September by Earl Howe that ‘any infringement of human rights arising out of water fluoridation is justified by the benefits to oral health’.

Like innumerable Secretaries of State for Health for the last century or so, the noble Earl’s background is unfortunately somewhat transparent when it comes to both science and law. So it was obvious that he had been fed this startling one-liner by our old antagonists at the MHRA. But sadly, Earl Howe was unable to reveal where his remarkable and out-of-context assurance to the Lords first appeared in print.

Digging up old evidence.

But only a month later, the Agency ventured into the murky depths of Human Rights law, in which it has absolutely no authority - or, indeed, any apparent competence. Ingenuously, it had in turn relied on information fed to it by a somewhat less than impartial Dept of Health. This purported to provide chapter and verse on human rights and fluoridation. And inevitably, all concerned have made themselves look utterly foolish!

In response to an inquiry from Tim Farron MP, on 25th October the bewildered Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Public Health, Ms Anne Milton MP, triumphantly conjured - apparently out of nowhere - the MHRA’s 'authority' for Earl Howe’s controversial claim.

She helpfully informed Mr Farron that:-
'Your constituent may also find it helpful to be aware of the view taken by the European Commission of Human Rights in the case of Guy Jehl-Doberer v Switzerland (Application No. 17667/91), which sets out that fluoridation is different from compulsory medical treatment and that any infringement of human rights is justified by the benefits to oral health. We share this view.'

('We' in this letter was her good self and the MHRA.) So that’s where Earl Howe’s unidentified quotation came from!

Happily, a copy of that communication found its way to me, by a circuitous route via a colleague who is curiously skilled in the art of stirring things up a bit.

So I dug out a copy of the original Court Report in this celebrated case, as of course one does. And from then on, as on so many previous occasions, the MHRA’s case rapidly plummeted into the abyss of absurdity and deception.

The first skirmish does not define the battle!

For it turns out that the MHRA (and of course, its Ringmaster, the Dept of Health) has placed its money on the preliminary David-and-Goliath skirmish between the Applicant, Guy Jehl-Doberer, a worthy citizen of the Swiss Canton of Basel-Stadt, and the Respondent, the Grand Council of that ilk.

But the Commission then accepted the opinion of the Respondent (notice how ‘opinion’ pops up everywhere in this charade) that the benefits of fluoridation outweighed the disadvantages. The Commission ruled that whilst the ‘infringement’ was indeed real, its overall benefits were ‘proportionate'. On this basis - and on this alone - the Commission decided that fluoridation could be permitted.

The Final Decision - Goliath concedes defeat!

But what the MHRA just happened to forget to mention to Ms Milton when drawing her attention to this case was that only twelve years later, in 2003, the evidence on which this judgment was founded was retracted by the Respondent in this little confrontation. Significantly, the Grand Council then permanently abolished fluoridation in Basel because it didn’t work and was harming too many of its kids.

Remember, that profoundly relevant reversal occurred almost ten years ago - that was after the publication of the York Review which authoritatively downgraded fluoridations reputation severely, and whose authors had already been forced to draw attention to deliberate misrepresentation of its findings by named fluoridation proponents.

And the Grand Council’s decision to stop fluoridation in Basel was also taken before a whole new load of evidence (including Bassin’s work on osteosarcoma and the European Commission’s SCHER Report) emerged to confirm just how dangerous fluoridated water really is.

Don't bother to check this out - here's all that you need to know!

In fact, the Department of Health's monumental Explanatory Notes to the Health and Social Care Bill prepared in September 2011, does actually mention the Jehl-Doberer case. Here's the exhaustive and detailed review of this crucial case that the the DoH helpfully provided to our terminally befuddled and conditioned MPs:-

'Fluoridation remains a general service to the population, and although it is designed to protect public dental health it does not constitute compulsory medical treatment [. . .] The aim of fluoridation is the prevention of tooth decay and fluoridation is a proportionate measure for addressing that public health aim.'

A 'general service to the population'? So it benefits those unfortunate toothless souls amongst us, does it? An although it's effectively unavoidable, it's not compulsory - what fantasy world are these people living in?

The DoH's minimal reference to this case appears only as a footnote to paragraph 1549, on page 259 of this 276 page document - not exactly the most obvious item for busy MPs to spot.

And even then, it's suitably dismissed as all very arcane and abstruse - so don't bother your over-worked heads to check it out, those nice people at the DoH and MHRA have done it all for you!

Once more into the breach - Earl Howe rides to the rescue.

Precisely how fluoridation manages to be an unavoidable prophylactic treatment and at the same time not to be compulsory medical treatment is not debated or explained by the Explanatory Notes, so Earl Howe once again gallantly gallops into the breach to help us, the idiot public, understand this difficult stuff.

In answer to Earl Baldwin's questions in the House of Lords on 10th January this year he replies that
'We consider that, where there is no physical contact, surgical or otherwise, made with the patient, the critical factor in judging whether a medical treatment is occurring is whether a medical product as defined by the MHRA is involved.'
(There's that 'We' again - he means his good self and his trusty side-kicks, the handlers and fixers at the MHRA.)

So let's get this straight then - if the MHRA says that a product is not a medicine, then despite Lord Jauncey having said that it is, it's not? And if no physical contact is made with the person swallowing the stuff, then putting stuff that isn't medicine because the MHRA says it's not - even though it is - into the water supply isn't medication?

So if a mother puts a real medicine, such as Aspirin, into a glass of water, places it on the table, and her child then drinks it, then because no physical contact has occurred, this still wouldn't be medication, because no-one has touched the stuff except the child - but if the MHRA says it IS a medicine, then it is, even if no-one has touched it - is that what the MHRA is claiming?

Phew! I was getting worried that nobody would get the message - thanks for that illuminating explanation! Seriously, though - if this form of circular argument is the only thing protecting us from these lunatics, then it's absolutely essential that this dangerous outfit is closed down before the week is out!

Ignore the Courts and real life - we'll tell you how it's got to be!

So let's get back to Jehl-Doberer. The commission ruled that fluoridation does violate Article 8. So what we appear to have now is a government Agency that permits its crony, the Dept of Health, to impose its 'opinions' to pervert its own regulatory function purely to support its own spurious policies, and with complete disregard for English and European Human Rights jurisprudence.

And it does so on the strength of its own interpretation of a ruling by the European Commission that relied on evidence that was retracted as unsound, in 2003, by the very organisation that benefited from the Court’s original decision. But that evidence was then found to be unsound, so the judgment had to be ignored and fluoridation stopped because, as the Commission had also ruled, it violated Article 8 of the European Convention.

As I have commented recently, it is apparently completely beyond the capacity of the Secretary of State for Health, Mr Andrew Lansley MP, to bring the MHRA to heel. This rogue quango must be completely reconfigured to prevent the continuation of such appalling maladministration.

It is in flagrant contempt of Lord Jauncey, who has already ruled that fluoridated water is a medicine, and of the ECJ that has made it abundantly clear that the Agency has absolutely no authority to exercise its ‘discretion’ over the regulation of products such as fluoridated water.

Now it appears to be trying to increase its spurious authority by misdirecting Members and Parliament by issuing its improper and worthless opinion on human rights. So is this how the fix is in, to make sure that the fluoridation provisions in this defective Health and Social Care Bill will be allowed to sneak through Parliament, to permit the State to carry out serious medical assault on 20 million of the British public?

Government by anarchy

The decision of the Joint Committee on Human Rights not to subject this proposed legislation to scrutiny, even when it has been warned of this gross abuse of the right of the public to refuse medication, must now be regarded as a matter of extreme public concern.

The repeated claim of the NHS to rely on ‘evidence-based medicine’ is cynical and dangerous propaganda. When regulators are able to pander with impunity to political policies that rest on false doctrines and dangerously unsafe and discredited practices, ignoring all reliable scientific evidence in order to preserve the status quo through their arbitrary and ultra vires exercise of unrestrained powers, then governmental and legislative processes lose all public credibility.


The inevitable result is anarchy.

What do They know?

For those of you with a more inquiring disposition, here is the file that has been sent to the Joint Committee on Human Rights. It went off by email on 28th November 2011, and was immediately acknowledged and forwarded to the Committee's legal eagle - so They do know what was sent, and We know what They know - and when They knew it!

(For the record, They knew all about it ten weeks ago.)

This file is the most comprehensive examination of human rights issues that I have produced so far. It deals with the application of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Feeedoms, and the interpretation of Article 3 (prohibition on degrading treatment) in circumstances in which personal consent is obstructed by deliberate misinformation provided by the State to the target population.

Feel free to distribute this widely - it is intended to promote discussion on the way that Human Rights challenges might be devised under similar legal codes wherever fluoridation is practised without full and informed consent of the public.

For the PDF file
Fluoridation, Human Rights, and the Health and Social Care Bill

CLICK HERE