AAP FACTCHECK – Article six of the Nuremberg Code says governments that mandate face masks are guilty of a war crime, social media users claim.
This is false. The Nuremberg Code does not mention face masks.
The claim has been around since at least 2021 and has previously been debunked by fact-checkers at Reuters, AP FactCheck and FullFact.
However, despite already being proven false, the claim is still being posted to social media.
Many of the posts include a meme that says: “What specifically does the Nuremberg Code lay out in Article 6 Section 3 regarding war crimes?”
The meme then quotes what it claims to be article six of the code.
The claimed wording is: “In no case should a collective community agreement or the consent of a community leader or other authority substitute for an individual’s informed consent.
“Leaders should be aware that mandating masks on the citizens of a nation and preventing their access to food, healthcare, transport, or education if they don’t comply is a war crime. Masks or any other medical intervention must remain voluntary.”
The Nuremberg Code is a ten-point statement that sets out guidelines for the permissible boundaries of medical experimentation on humans.
The code was issued in 1947 after the Nuremberg trials of German medical researchers accused of committing crimes against humanity in the name of medical research during the Second World War.
Sixteen of the doctors were found guilty and seven were sentenced to death.
The code is thought to have been authored by three American prosecutors at the trial.
Article six of the code refers to balancing the risk of medical experiments. It says: “The degree of risk to be taken should never exceed that determined by the humanitarian importance of the problem to be solved by the experiment”.
The Nuremberg Code does not include any reference to face masks.
Some of the wording used in the false posts appears to come from a 2009 publication called The UNESCO Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights.
Article six of that document discusses medical consent and includes a similar sentence to that used in the top half of the meme. Notably: “In no case should a collective community agreement or the consent of a community leader or other authority substitute for an individual’s informed consent.”
However, the UNESCO declaration does not include the other sentences quoted in the meme related to mask mandates, nor any other reference to “masks” or “face masks”.
Associate Professor Megan Best, a health ethics researcher at the University of Notre Dame Australia, told AAP FactCheck in June 2021 that the Nuremberg Code was no longer used to guide research ethics as it had been replaced by the World Medical Association’s 1964 Helsinki Declaration.
Emma Cave, a professor of healthcare law at Durham University, told Full Fact in 2021 that the Nuremberg Code was a set of guidelines rather than a law and was not legally binding.
The Verdict
False – The claim is inaccurate.
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