From around minute 28 to 48 in the video below, British lawyer Francis Hoar describes the outrageous subversion of justice he is encountering the U.K. I created an approximate transcript of what was disclosed in this discussion to make information more readily accessible.
Lawyer Francis Hoar:
Great Britain has a Steps regulation. Stages of lockdown. Like that’s a regular way of living. It normalizes that it can be regulated with whom you can meet. Whether you can leave the house and all that stuff. It suggests it’s fine because you can have a lower level of lockdown.
Media is worse in the U.K. than in Italy [Hoar speaks after lawyer Renata Holzeisen’s description of Italian measures]. The judiciary is worse. Much worse than in the United States where we’ve seen a lot of quite good judgements. There were 2 good judgements in Weimar, Germany. One in January and the last one recently.
The judicial cases in England, Wales and Scotland have been very bad indeed. A major claim I did with Simon Donan as the claimant which challenged the whole lockdown - the lawfulness of it - the key element of that were
1. The judiciary just dismissed it with very poor reasoning. We have acts of Parliament that are unimpeachable by the courts because we don’t have a written or defined constitution but those acts of Parliament give ministers the right to introduce legislation. That’s what they did through lockdown.
International Health Regulations 2005 gave a number of recommendations to national governments which were no where near envisaging lockdowns. There was a suggestion about international travel being regulated, perhaps closure of certain events. We’ve never seen the sort of legislation before 2020 that we are seeing now. We’ve never seen this sort of behavior before. This relates to the WHO [World Health Organization] planning in 2019.
Parts of the acts of Parliament that gave ministers the right specifically to deal with people who might be infectious. This was the key criteria ignored in their judgement. The key criteria for imposing these regulations is that they could impose these regulations on people who might be infectious. That’s the key point that Lord Sumption made. He is a retired Supreme Court judge. He said the decision of the court of appeal was wrong and he has made the observation that the judgement was woefully thin in the terms of its reasoning.
The proportionality test is prominent in all jurisdictions.
2. Reading the Dolan Judgment, its unrecognizable to anyone who considers proportionality. It says that because the government is acting on the basis of evidence, it may impose regulations - even regulations that were never envisaged before 2020. These are the most extreme deprivations of freedoms that we’ve ever encountered in England or Wales. That includes even during the protectorate under Cromwell or even during the Middle Ages. We’ve never had a period where everyone in England was told they had to stay in their houses. And this is happening in most places in the world.
There’s an unwillingness in courts to hear evidence. Even the court of appeals refused to give permission to review the proportionality of the original lockdown regulations. It gave no regard whatsoever to the evidence. The Proportionality test has to be engaged in positive ways, ways that have to justify the type of legislation we’ve had. One must be satisfied the advantages outweigh the disadvantages and more so where there are economic and healthcare devastations. A balance must be struck. It’s poor reasoning from very senior judges in England.
Lord Sumption has been speaking out.
We’re talking about things regarding the conception of the law and proportionality and rationality frankly that anyone would not have believed or claimed to believe before 2020.
Lawyer Dr. Reiner Fuellmich:
The balancing of proportionality doesn’t play a role anymore. They pretend they are weighing the pros and cons of all these approaches but they’re not really. Everything is being overwritten by what they’re calling the precautionary principle and I think it sounds like what’s happening in England
Lawyer Francis Hoar:
In light of the Dolan judgement that is very much what happened. One of the elements of the lockdown we were challenging was the decision by the government to elevate 5 tests which all related to the virus above any other considerations. The government expressly said on a number of occasions it would only reduce the conditions if each or some if those 5 tests were met. None of which related to economic activity. No questions raised about health or any thing else. Even though it is pretty obvious to any one with a rational mind that the virus is the least of our concerns. When it came to the economic and social catastrophe that were the result of the lockdowns, they didn’t even allow for a weighing process, a balancing process.
The court of appeals extraordinarily said that that was acceptable because the Government can decide what factors it takes into account, completely ignoring again all the precedent that says of course when it’s taking away fundamental rights it has to balance the advantages against the disadvantages and has to consider evidence.
And they also used some cases, such as smoking advertising cases involving extremely niche areas of public policy where the courts are understandably unwilling to intervene but other cases referred to by government involved fisheries for example.
In this case we’re talking about keeping people in their houses, regulating whom they can meet, closing down businesses and so on. It’s totally unprecedented. The most extraordinary and appalling judgements that I’ve read in all my years of practicing law unfortunately. That’s where we are in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland.
Lawyer Dr. Reiner Fuellmich:
Are people in England trying to attack at the very foundation of what’s bling on. Are people trying to attack the reliability of the PCR test? Because without the PCR test, there wouldn’t be any lockdowns.
Lawyer Francis Hoar:
Interesting. What we’ve been trying to look at is to find a set of circumstances - you need to find the right case with which to challenge the PCR test. In Portugal, they have a Habeas Corpus case. The detention of people in hotel quarantine beyond a certain point was unlawful because the basis on which they were doing it was that they were infected and they were basing that on a PCR test. They had the jurisdiction to do that. It is possible to find similar circumstances in England. They have felt isolation in your own house is not detention.
Lawyer Dr. Reiner Fuellmich:
The Drosten PCR test is the only way governments have determined infection. If it turns out that the Drosten PCR test cannot tell you anything about infection. Then the whole house of cards must collapse.
Lawyer Francis Hoar:
Its a question of finding a case that forces the courts to consider it.
Lawyer Dr. Reiner Fuellmich:
The Austrian court found there’s no factual basis for the lockdowns. The question is do the governments take the decision that their courts make seriously and in Austria, they don’t. In Germany, the same kind of efforts can be seen. The government tried to do everything it can to put everyone under a lot of pressure including the judges of course - who are not in line. They’re trying to impose British legal thinking on our German system which is completely different at least as far as procedural law is concerned. Substantive law is in many ways similar.
The way a public figure deals with this legal offensive reveals a lot about whether they are sincere regarding genuine empowerment of the public.
Lawyer Viviane Fischer:
Do you have testing in schools?
Lawyer Francis Hoar:
Yes, we have testing and masks in schools. My latest case issued to a school is a challenge to the mask policy. We’re examining the efficacy of masks and the harm that they cause to children. We want them to injunct that school’s trust to prevent them from implementing that policy. And they also impose testing. It’s not compulsory.
Lawyer Viviane Fischer:
Are you aware we already have an expert opinion on the masks.
Lawyer Dr. Reiner Fuellmich:
Are you aware of the recent German decision?
Lawyer Francis Hoar:
We are relying on the Weimar decision. We need an official translation of it.
Lawyer Dr. Reiner Fuellmich:
This really an agenda that is being pushed in lockstep everywhere. Yet there are slight differences. Those differences are important because now I understand what they are trying to do here with the judiciary. Trying to put the judiciary under the same kind of legal constraints that you have in England without them existing in this county [Germany]. It’s very interesting to see this. It kind of uncovers their tracks.
Please don’t get tricked by fake populists.
After I took my notes on Dr. Reiner Fuellmich and Viviane Fischer’s conversation with Francis Hoar, I happened to locate a transcript of this very conversation at this link here.
I’ve reproduced it below.
(28:19 – 47:51) Now, Francis Hoar. Francis, I don’t think we’ve ever spoken before. I know we’ve spoken about you. Are you with us?
Francis Hoar: I’m with you.
Dr Reiner Fuellmich: Perfect, how are you doing?
FH: Very well thank you. I had a slight problem with the timing I had a bit of confusion, but fortunately somebody called me just now so it’s all fine.
Reiner Fuellmich: Okay great. So, what’s it like in Great Britain? Is it similar to what we just heard from our colleague from Italy?
FH: It’s really difficult to compare because you can only read about what’s happening elsewhere so it’s best to give my impression. We’re on these what are called steps regulations, and by October last year the Government for the first time, in what I thought was a very concerning development, adopted this stage one stage two stage three lockdown, which then they called something different, but now they’re calling it the steps regulation, and the whole idea of that is you’re stepping out of lockdown. I’ve always thought that that was a particularly pernicious institution – the stages of lockdown because it was done to indicate this was a normal way of living and a normal way of states regulating their citizens. So we saw it in South Africa, in Australia, in New Zealand and so on, and obviously it’s utterly unprecedented, but it normalises the idea that you can regulate with whom you can meet in your own house, whether you can go outside, and so on and all that kind of stuff and suggests its fine because you can have a lower level of lockdown when there’s certain levels of risk, but however we’re in that situation and the media is little better, if no worse than in Italy and in most other places.
The judiciary is worse than in most of Europe certainly, must worse than in the United States where we’ve seen quite a lot of good judgements. I’m thinking of whether it was Wyoming or what, there was an excellent supreme court, one of the Supreme courts in the United States and there was an excellent judgement in Weimar recently of course, January and the mask one recently, but the judicial decisions in my cases and in other cases that we’ve had in England and Wales, and to a lesser extent in Scotland, because fewer cases have been brought to the jurisdiction in Scotland have been very bad indeed. I’m just looking at the major case that I did with Simon Dolan as the claimant, which challenged the whole initial lockdown and the lawfulness of it, I’m just looking at the judgement now and the key elements of that were:
that the judiciary dismissed with very poor reasoning the idea that the act of parliament, so we have a system called secondary legislation so we have, as you know, acts of parliament which are unimpeachable by the courts because we don’t have a written unified constitution, but those acts of parliament can give ministers the power to introduce legislation and that’s what they did through the lockdown. The act of parliament that’s being used in England and Wales and Scotland and Northern Ireland it’s called the public health control of disease act 1984 that was amended in 2008 to introduce some changes and regulations that could be introduced that came from the international health regulations (IHR) 2005.
Now, as you may know the international health regulations 2005 gave a number of different recommendations to national governments, none of which were anything close to envisioning lockdowns. There was suggestion about international travel being regulated, perhaps closure of certain events and so on, and I think viewers will be aware that the pandemic planning in different countries has been never envisaged before 2020 anything of the sort, the sort of behaviour that Governments and the sort of legislation that have been introduced in 2020 and that goes right as far as the WHO pandemic plan in 2019, which was very very far away from even considering anything like this, so I mentioned that because one of the things the court took into account was that in 2008 the intention of parliament was to introduce the IHR, the International Health Regulations, but in fact the International Health Regulations say nothing, envisage nothing like this. I won’t go into the details as I don’t have time, but parts of the act of parliament that gave ministers the power to regulate was specifically dealing with those suspected people who may be infectious and it’s something the court completely ignored in their judgement. The key criterion for imposing these regulations was that they could be imposed on those who may be infected and that’s a key point that Lord Sumption who viewers may recognise the name, he’s been very vocal and extremely eloquent in speaking out against this as a supreme court judge, he has made the observation that the court of appeal were wrong and not only were they wrong, but judgement was woefully thin in terms of its reasoning. Very concerning me too the judgement, I think we’ll all be aware in Europe and to a certain extend in the common law world as well of the proportionality test which is prominent in all jurisdictions that have connections to the European Convention of Human Rights but is also applied whether it’s called that or not throughout the common law world.
Reading the Dolan judgement, it’s unrecognisable to anyone who considers proportionality because essentially the court says that because the Government is acting on the basis of evidence that it has considered it may impose regulations, even regulations that were never envisaged before 2020 and are the most extreme deprivations of freedoms that we’ve ever encountered in England and Wales, including the protectants under Cromwell and even to some extent the middle ages we’ve never had a period where everyone in England was told that they had to stay in their houses and so on, and this will be the same in most other countries in the world, so the idea that that was, since I heard Renata talking about the unwillingness of courts to consider evidence, the court of appeal refuse to even give permission to review the proportionality of the original lockdown regulations. It gave no regard whatsoever to the evidence, and you might think the proportionality tests in ways that justify the type of legislation that we’ve had, you must surely be able to satisfy that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages and more so where the fundamental rights are so important and the economic and healthcare devastation of policy being implemented, in this case the lockdowns and medium types of lockdown regulations falling short of lockdowns that the balancing exercise must be struck. Reading that judgement it’s pretty extraordinary and an extremely poor set of reasoning from very senior judges in England and Wales that ignore that, and in fact interestingly the three courses in the Supreme court which are binding on the court of appeal, the Supreme Court is the court that brings together the United Kingdom so the jurisdictions of Northern Ireland, Scotland and England and Wales all feed into the Supreme Court, it’s not quite a constitutional court and it can’t strike down acts of parliament, it can strike down secondary legislation like this though.
Reiner Fuellmich: So it includes Gibraltar doesn’t it?
FH: Yeah, it does but in a slightly different way, so there’s the privy council which is effectively the same judges, and they deal with appeals from the Caribbean. Some independent countries with the Queen as the head of state and some overseas territories such as Gibraltar, St Helena, Falkland Islands and so on, yes, they are effectively the same judges.
Reiner Fuellmich: Lord Sumption was very outspoken. Has he toned down his rhetoric lately, or?
FH: No he hasn’t, he wrote another excellent article in the Daily Telegraph or possibly the Sunday Telegraph this weekend, no he hasn’t toned down his rhetoric or his analysis, nor has he changed it. He’s been consistently speaking against lockdowns in a way that most, again I go back to the point we’ll all recognise that essentially what we’re doing is talking about the conception of law proportionality and rationality frankly that anyone would have believed or claimed to have believed before 2020 when they became terrified by a virus with an IFR of maybe 0.25 percent and an average death of eighty-two, the statistics that we are all too familiar with.
Reiner Fuellmich: The thing is we’re hearing from our colleagues in Canada in particular, because they’re pretty experienced in the meantime that the balancing the proportionality in effect doesn’t play a role anymore. I mean, they pretend they’re weighing the pros and cons of all these approaches but they’re not really because everything is being overridden by what they now call the precautionary principle and I think that’s what it sounds like is happening in England as well.
FH: Again, going back to the Dolan judgement in England that’s very much what happened. One of the elements of the lockdown that we were challenging was the decision by the Government to elevate five tests which all related to the virus, above any other considerations, and the Government expressly said on a number of occasions that it would only reduce the restrictions if each or some of those five tests were met, none of which related to economic activity, none of it was related to health, other than the virus, even though it was pretty obvious to anyone with a rational mind that the virus was least of our concerns when it came to the economic and social catastrophe that was being caused by the lockdowns, so they didn’t even allow for a weighing process a balanced process and the court of appeal extraordinarily said that was an acceptable because the Government can decide what factors it takes into account, completely ignoring again all the precedent that says of course when it’s taking away fundamental rights it has to balance the advantages against the disadvantages and has to consider evidence, and they also used some cases such as smoking cases and smoking advertising cases, which involved extremely niche areas of public policy where the courts are understandably willing to intervene where some of the cases referred to by the Government involved fisheries, for example, so the scientific advisory on fisheries, in those cases obviously the courts have said that they will not intervene unless there’s a very clearly irrational statement by a scientist or whatever obviously, but in this case we’re talking about locking people in their houses, or not quite, but regulating who they can meet, closing down businesses and so on. It’s totally unprecedented and it’s a most extraordinary and appalling judgement I’ve read in practically all my years of practicing law, unfortunately and unfortunately that’s the case I was in, but that’s where we are in England and Wales, Scotland and pretty much Scotland and Northern Ireland, which haven’t even had the kind of challenges that we’ve had.
Reiner Fuellmich: Are there lawyers who are trying to attack at the very foundation of what’s going on, meaning are people attack the reliability of the PCR tests because without the PCR tests there wouldn’t be any lockdowns?
FH: Very interesting and what we’ve been trying to look at is finding a set of circumstances with which to challenge the PCR test. In Portugal they had a Habeas Corpus case effectively that the detention of the people in hotel quarantine beyond a certain point was unlawful because the basis on which they were doing it was that they were infected, and they were basing that on a PCR test, so they had the jurisdiction to do that. It is possible to find similar circumstances in England because there are circumstances where hotel quarantine can continue beyond a certain point, but it’s difficult and courts have found that the self-isolation in your own house is not detention. In fact, in a case that I’m dealing with at the moment dealing with self-isolation requirements for travellers from non-red list countries, so where we’re not imposing hotel self-quarantine there’s an imposition of ten days at home and there’s a case now before the court of appeal where I’m representing somebody who was subject to that last year and it’s taken a very long time to get to the high court and now it’s in the Court of Appeal or waiting for a Court of Appeal to hear if it decides it. In that case the judge found that it wasn’t detention when you were required to be in your own house, even though the European convention case will suggest that that is a form of house arrest.
Reiner Fuellmich: So I would suggest…
FH: …think about finding the, but unless you have detention, you’re not going to be able to challenge the PCR test because you challenge detention on the basis that you are being detained because of the risk that you are infected or infectious, and as the result…
Reiner Fuellmich: …that’s funny because the PCR test thing is the only way, the Drosden PCR test, is the only way that any of these Governments decide whether or not there are too many infections…
FH: …exactly…
Reiner Fuellmich: …so if it turns out, and we know this is the case because we’ve spoken to all of these experts, if it turns out that the Drosden PCR test cannot tell you anything about infections, then the whole house of cards must collapse.
FH: But it’s as Renata said it’s finding a way of challenging and getting the, forcing the courts to analyse it, so judicial review which is the form of challenging public laws so secondary legislation and the act of Government, it’s very difficult to challenge the use of the PCR test in judicial review because the standard is very high, it’s very difficult for a claimant to succeed in judicial reviews because Governments get a lot of latitude, but if you’re talking about detention that requires evidence that somebody is infectious so then you can challenge the PCR test, which is why the Portuguese claim worked as a way of doing that.
Reiner Fuellmich: Well, the Austrian court didn’t need detention, the Austrian court just asked for the foundation and found this is unconstitutional because there’s no factual basis for any of these measures. The other question of course is does the Government take its courts decisions seriously? And they don’t in Austria – not yet, and here in Germany the same kinds of efforts can be seen, it is so that the Government tries everything it can to put everyone under a lot of pressure, including the judges of course who are not in line, and I’m afraid what they are trying to do right now they’re trying to impose the British legal thinking as you explained it right now onto our German system, which is completely different – at least as far as the procedural law is concerned. Subset laws in this case are similar, but Francis I don’t want to cut you off but we’re under a tight schedule…
FH: …yeah I know…
Vivienne: Do you also have the testing problems in the schools like for instance right now?
FH: Yeah we do. We have testing in schools. We have masks in school, in fact my latest case issued today is a challenge to a school imposing a mask policy and the idea of that is for it to be a test case and we’re examining the efficacy of masks and the harm they cause to children and we’re asking the court to injunct that school trust and prevent them from imposing this mask policy on schools, but they also impose testing, so there is also testing in schools – it’s not compulsory but it’s obviously there is a lot of coercion on children who don’t do it, and parents.
Vivienne: Are you aware that we have expert opinions already on the masks? Are you aware of this?
FH: Yeah.
Reiner Fuellmich: You are aware of the German decision the very recent German decision…
FH:…Weimar, we arere relying on the Weimar decision yes we were relying on that, absolutely. In fact, we need an official translation (inaudible) for another time, but we have a reasonably good translation of it so far and we’ll get the full official one.
Reiner Fuellmich: Okay well very good. Well thank you for explaining what’s going on in Great Britain. It’s eye opening to a degree because on the one hand it shows that this is really an agenda that is being pushed in lockstep everywhere, but there are slight differences and those differences are important because now I understand what they’re trying to do here with the judiciary, they’re trying to put the judiciary under the same kinds of legal constraints that you have there without them existing here in this country. It’s very interesting to see this. It kind of uncovers their tracks. Okay, well thank you very much Francis. We’ll be in touch.
FH: Pleasure. Thank you.