Supreme Court Rules Australian Vaccine Mandate Was Unlawful
A Supreme Court in Australia has just ruled that draconian Covid vaccine mandates issued against emergency responders were unlawful.
Australia’s Queensland Supreme Court has ruled that the COVID vaccine mandates implemented on police and ambulance workers violated their Human Rights Act.
In 2022, both police and ambulance service workers questioned the constitutionality of the mandate.
Multiple lawsuits were filed against the state over the mandate that was issued in December 2021.
In a landmark Supreme Court ruling on Tuesday, Justice Glenn Martin of the Queensland Supreme Court found the Queensland Police Commissioner Katarina Carroll’s direction for mandatory Covid vaccination to be unlawful under the Human Rights Act.
A similar Covid vaccination order issued by the Director-General of Queensland Health at the time, John Wakefield, was determined to be “of no effect.”
Enforcement of both mandates and any related disciplinary actions are to be banned, the court ruled as it delivered judgments in three lawsuits brought by 86 parties.
Justice Martin held that the Police Commissioner “did not consider the human rights ramifications” before issuing the Covid workplace vaccination directive within the Queensland Police Service (QPS).
The Covid vaccination directive to Queensland Ambulance Service (QAS) workers, meanwhile, was found to be lawful.
However, Justice Martin said that the Director-General had failed to “establish that the direction he made is a term of employment of the applicants.”
Justice Martin chastised the Commissioner and the Director-General for their inflexibility in the implementation of vaccination directives and suggested that their actions were not properly supported by the evidence.
“Neither the Commissioner nor Dr. Wakefield gave close attention to the possible range of solutions,” stated Justice Martin in the decision.
“Each was presented with a proposal for mandatory vaccination with little in the way of well-developed critiques of alternative means of reducing illness and infection.”