Pandemics and Human Rights

               While we all are in quarantine because of the coronavirus, why not to spend our time at home to help fight injustice and violations of human rights. Record any violation of human rights you witnessed online or offline, send your testimony to human rights organisms, NGOs or to the victims. This post is a summary of two articles. The first with the title above was published in March 2020 at   https://www.justsecurity.org/69141/pandemics-and-human-rights/. The second was published at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/19/coronavirus-pandemic-human-rights

              Pandemics are fertile breeding grounds for governmental overreach. After the outbreak of COVID-19 (coronavirus), China required citizens to install software on their smartphones which predicts people's health status, tracks their location, and determines whether they can enter a public place. Meanwhile in Kyrgyzstan, coronavirus may have been used as a justification to stifle political and social activism. Protesters recently held demonstrations seeking the release of an opposition politician in advance of upcoming parliamentary elections. Against this backdrop, a court granted the mayor's application to ban all protests in the city centre until July 1.  The court cited the coronavirus as one of the reasons for the ban. The coronavirus is indeed a significant threat to public health, As of writing, there are over 120,000 confirmed cases and the number will exponentially grow. However, as we have seen during other emergency situations, some governments use a crisis as a pretext to infringe rights. Other retain over-broad emergency powers after the crisis subsides. In the midst of an emergency, whether caused by an epidemic, terrorist attack, or otherwise, countries tend to give vast powers to the executive branch. To a certain extent, this is understandable. Therefore, emergency or not, States must reach the same threshold of legality, legitimacy, necessity and proportionality for each measure taken. While certain "social distancing" measures are appropriate, other decisions impermissibly restrict the freedom of assembly. An example is the court decision to impose a four-month ban on assemblies in Kyrgyzstan. Even though there were no confirmed cases of coronavirus in the country. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) prohibit any kind of discrimination. International law prohibit governments from forcing communities to assume discriminatory burdens after an outbreak. We are concerned by reports that Chinese authorities have forced Uighurs to work at factories previously closed due to the risk of coronavirus infection. The Chinese response to coronavirus initially focused on suppressing the reports of whistleblowers and discouraging the dissemination of information about the virus. These restrictions would appear to violate international law, which protects the right to freedom of expression and the right to seek, and impart information and ideas. A number of international instruments, including Article 25 of the ICCPR, protect the right to participate in public affairs. Moreover, engaging people in the development of strategies, policies, and practices increases the likelihood of effective responses. Government measures may also implicate a number of other rights, including the rights to life and health, the freedoms of association and movement, and the right to an effective remedy when violations occur. To promote rights-respecting governmental measures during a public health emergency: 1) Governments should provide accurate and timely information to civil society and the public about public health issues and provide opportunities for the public to participate in the design, implementation, and evaluation of responses to public health emergencies. 2) Measures should be publicly accessible and precise to enable an individual to determine what is prohibited and what is permitted.  3) Measures should be motivated by legitimate public health goals and not be used as a pretext to pursue illegitimate aims.  4) Measures should be of a limited duration with a requirement of review. 5) Governments should work with civil society to undertake a rapid human rights impact assessment to ensure that measures and actions do not inappropriately infringe fundamental freedoms.

                   I saw a private briefing from a bank, soothingly reassuring its clients that "this feels more like 9/11 than 2008". I think the point was to let investors know that this crisis is not systemic. I can think of a host of reasons why 9/11 does not bring calming thoughts to mind, but one is the long-term impact it had on human rights. Back then I was in the early stages of becoming a human rights lawyer. My very first day in court was with the team defending a victim of extraordinary rendition, where Britain had helped facilitate his torture. By the time I was practising, the 7 July london bombings had happened, and so had draconian new laws - 90 day detention without trial, plus sweeping surveillance and monitoring. Many Muslims remember this time that racial profiling and state harassment became the new normal. This might sound like a strange issue to raise when the national priority is how to stop the spread of coronavirus, treat the sick and tackle the hit to the economy. But since last month, the potential has been building for a clash between liberty, privacy and public health measures.  The legislation is likely to ban public gathering, to widen police and immigration officer powers of detention and restraint, to give doctors powers to sign death certificates without seeing the deceased person's body. Our human rights protections - long maligned by many of the politicians now running our pandemic-stricken nation - were designed for moments such as this. They contain specific exemptions for situations in which the state needs to contain the spread of infectious disease. Laywers who focus on the right to human dignity in the care of vulnerable or elderly people were appalled to hear Boris Johnson suggest that the death of vast numbers of British people would be an acceptable price to pay for so-called "herd immunity". There is the potential for a kind of tyranny of the majority - one of the reasons we need human rights in the first place - and then there are the new, established but upgraded, tyrannies of the state.