Hours after being sworn in, President Joe Biden informed United Nations Director-General Antonio Guterres about the US’ decision to re-join the World Health Organisation. He also reversed Donald Trump’s controversial ‘Muslim travel ban’, which blocked travel to the United States from several predominantly Muslim and African countries, and signed an executive order to rejoin the Paris climate accord.
Walking back on the former administration’s plan to withdraw the US from the WHO, Biden said: “This letter constitutes a retraction by the Government of the United States of the letter dated July 6, 2020, notifying you that the Government of the United States intended to withdraw from the World Health Organization (WHO), effective July 6, 2021. The United States intends to remain a member of the World Health Organization.” In the letter, the President said that the US will be part of WHO’s fight against the coronavirus.
“The WHO plays a crucial role in the world’s fight against the deadly Covid-19 pandemic as well as countless other threats to global health and health security. The United States will continue to be a full participant and a global leader in confronting such threats and advancing global health and health security,” he said.
Former President Donald Trump had in July last year pulled out the US from the WHO after criticising the body for covering up the outbreak of Covid-19, which emerged in China in 2019. The US had also backed out of a joint global effort led by the WHO to develop, manufacture and distribute a vaccine to cure coronavirus. The decision would have come into effect from July 6 this year.
Besides retracting from WHO, Biden has also taken the decision to re-join the Paris Agreement, from which Trump had pulled out in November last year.
“I, Joseph R Biden Jr, President of the United States of America, having seen and considered the Paris Agreement, done at Paris on December 12, 2015, do hereby accept the said Agreement and every article and clause thereof on behalf of the United States of America,” read the order. “We are going to combat climate change in a way we have not done so far,” Biden said.
Paris accord goal is related to limit global warming to well below 2° Celsius, and preferably limit it to 1.5° Celsius, compared to pre-industrial levels. It was adopted by 196 countries at Conference of the Parties COP 21 in Paris in December 2015 and signed on 22nd April 2016. However, US President Donald Trump withdrew from the agreement in November 2020 making the signatories nation number to 195.
The move by Biden has drawn accolades from Sundar Pichai, Google CEO who applauded him with the tweet, “We applaud @POTUS’s quick action on Covid relief, the Paris Climate Accord, and immigration reform. Google has supported action on these important issues & we look forward to working with the new administration to help the US recover from the pandemic + grow our economy”.
Hours after taking the office, Biden signed 17 executive orders memorandums and proclamations including ending the Muslim travel ban. He has directed the State Department to restart visa processing for individuals from the affected countries and to develop ways to address the harm caused to those who were prevented from coming to the United States because of the ban, The New York Times reported.
Implemented in 2017 during Trump’s first week in office, the Muslim Ban initially restricted travel from seven Muslim-majority nations: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. The ban faced several legal challenges, but the Supreme Court in 2018 upheld the final version of the measure. The Muslim travel ban so far restricts citizens from 12 countries—Iran, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Nigeria, Myanmar, Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Sudan, Tanzania and North Korea—and some Venezuelan officials and their relatives from obtaining a broad range of US visas, NPR reported.
Biden has also halted construction of Trump’s border wall with Mexico. The order includes an “immediate termination” of the national emergency declaration that allowed the Trump administration to redirect billions of dollars to the wall.