By TONY MOBILIFONITIS

SERENE Teffaha’s Melbourne-based human rights group AdvocateMe has teamed up with Maatouks Law Group to engage state and federal governments in a review of their response to the SARS-Cov-2 outbreak. The governments have until August 27^th to respond constructively or face legal action.

Teffaha, under the AdvocateMe banner, has written an open letter of request to governments “to review (their) disproportionate response to SARS-COV-2.” The letter raises issues around the combined government response and should the governments not respond, legal action will be initiated. The full text of the open letter is available here. As Cairns News readers will know, the panic created around the virus led to governments making outrageous impositions on the population at large, such as Victoria’s notorious lockdowns and the vaccine mandates.

Complaints raised in the letter include:

• the inaccuracy and misuse of RT-PCR testing
• detaining individuals without evidence of infection
• banning anti-Covid therapeutics hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin
• inflating infection statistics by declaring any coronavirus detected a Covid-19 infection and conflating suspected cases with probable or confirmed cases
• DNA data mining by BGI subsidiary Forensic Genomics International of China
• diagnosing asymptomatic people as positive merely by close contact or by contact tracing
• recording deaths as ‘from Covid-19’ without reference to pre-existing conditions and based on mere suspicion of infection or contributing to death
• unlawfully mandated influenza and Covid-19 vaccines without evidence of their efficacy to reduce hospitalisations.

Teffaha, who had her law licence suspended by the Victorian Legal Services Board after she clashed with a chief magistrate and the legal establishment over alleged misbehavior, is continuing her battle for justice by providing advocacy, administrative services and collaborative support to Maatouks senior principal solicitor, Peter Maatouk.

“We have also reached out for the legal direction and advice from  other solicitors, including the firm of Clemens Haskin Legal, who are dealing with the (Melbourne) Detention Towers Class Action that was filed earlier this year, and is still in play,” Teffaha states on her website.

The letter defends the role of the Biosecurity Act 2015, which was noted by many anti-Covid lockdown activists for the limits it placed on the use of downloadable Covid apps, in direct contradiction to state actions which attempted make phone apps mandatory for access to shops and various services.

AdvocateMe’s letter also raises the very important issue of abuse of human rights by governments making blanket declarations assuming, without evidence, that everyone represents a “biosecurity risk” and therefore should be subject to all sorts of restrictions and impositions.

“We say that that Act strikes a fair balance between the competing needs to protect the public
interest with the need to protect human rights. The Biosecurity Act 2015 is posited on a very important assumption and that people are healthy until they are shown to be a health risk,” the letter states.

“This means that all biosecurity security measures involving matters of quarantine including isolation, detention (including cross-border and returning travelers), treatment, vaccinations, obtaining bodily samples through testing and examinations, contact tracing and wearing clothing and equipment must not be required on any Australian resident without a proper assessment of their individual risk.”

The letter points to proper, lawful risk assessment involving demonstration of evidence that a person has the signs and symptoms of the listed human disease and/or has had direct physical contact or was in close proximity to another person who has the signs and symptoms of that disease.

“A properly authorised individual must show and prove this prerequisite risk assessment before
issuing a person a biosecurity control order or, the States/Territories’ equivalent, a public
health order,” the letter states.

The open letter goes on to note in respect of existing federal powers available for a national biosecurity emergency: “The emergency requirements are qualified and restricted by the significant fact that emergency requirements and directions cannot request an individual to be isolated, detained, tested, vaccinated, medically treated or bodily searched (amongst other actions) in the absence of a biosecurity control order issued to the individual.

“These measures are referred to as biosecurity measures and are captured under Subdivision B
of Division 3 of Part 3 of Chapter 2 of the Biosecurity Act 2015. Emergency and public health powers, at the States and Territories, do not provide a carte blanche to breach an individual’s human rights by isolating them, or detaining them or testing them without the proper required notifications and risk assessments first.”

The letter says states and territories exceeded their powers during the pandemic through directions and laws under public health and emergency legislation “that allow for the use of force
and issuing general directions, that involve biosecurity measures, in the absence of
biosecurity control orders and/or public health orders, to groups of healthy individuals.”

The letter goes on to detail instances of abuse by the states, for instance elderly people being quarantined for extended and unreasonable periods, being kept indoors and denied access to families. “This has grossly extended the standard 14-day period of detention and isolation otherwise applicable.”

Other abuses included forced influenza vaccinations as a condition of access to jobs and family in care facilities; detention in hotel quarantine at borders and forced testing without probable cause; laws in Western Australia legitimizing strip searching for the purpose of vaccination and medical treatment; a South Australian proposal to remove children from parents and place them in quarantine facilities.

“These actions are not only repulsive in our democracy but are simply not endorsed by the Biosecurity Act 2015. They also make a mockery of human rights when refer to safeguards of decency and sensitivity. The States and Territories have also imposed an inconsistent and crippling framework in
dealing with business closures and other business directions,” the letter states.