Human Rights in the Post-Pandemic Era

n 2020, governments around the world panicked in response to the declaration of a pandemic and imposed drastic interventions to impede the spread of Covid-19, interventions which crushed human rights on an unprecedented scale and without sufficient justification. Yet this was widely accepted, even by human rights organisations. How could this happen? And how could we amend human rights protections to ensure that it does not happen again?

In the aftermath of the Second World War, there was recognition that rights should be codified, leading to the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These rights are taken to be universal and inalienable.

The Declaration includes declaration of the rights to ‘life, liberty and security of person,’ freedom from torture, equality before the law, freedom of movement, including ‘the right to leave any country including his own, and return to his country,’ freedom to own property, freedom of thought, opinion and expression, freedom of assembly, and the right to education. 

These are a mix of fundamental rights and other categories. Fundamental rights are everyone’s birthrights originating in fundamental capabilities or states of being which we all have unless we are actively prevented from exercising them by others.