The Right to Health in Times of Pandemic

Health and human rights, 2020

As a graduate student in the early 2000s coming to grips with the meaning and interpretation of the right to health, few publications had as great an impact on me as the Harvard Law School and Francois-Xavier Bagnoud (FXB) Center's 1993 "Interdisciplinary Discussion on Economic and Social Rights and the Right to Health." 1 It captured a discussion between multiple heavy hitters of the field, including Jonathan Mann, then head of the FXB Center, Philip Alston, chair of the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, Martha Minow, a Harvard Law School professor, Albie Sachs, soon to be a member of South Africa's first Constitutional Court, and Paul Farmer, at that point an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School. The discussion transformed my understanding of human rights from laws found in 'black-letter' texts and court judgments, to a far more socially-generated, dynamic model of norms and standards. My light-bulb moment came when Martha Minow quoted Judith Shklar's insight that "civilization advances when what was perceived as misfortune is perceived as injustice." 2 In a seemingly impossible fight to expand the right to health to include universal access to affordable antiretroviral medicines during a global pandemic, Shklar articulated the social and political processes necessary for a radical transformation to take place. That global access to antiretrovirals subsequently shifted so dramatically and rapidly deeply underscored for me, as a junior scholar, that global crises could transform both our conceptions of health rights and justice and material outcomes. It is poignant to revisit that insight in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. As I write in early April 2020, extraordinary lockdowns and isolation measures affecting billions of people worldwide are in place to stop the explosive spread of SARS-CoV-2. The scale and impact of these measures are such that health and human rights scholars will likely be exploring their legitimacy, necessity, and proportionality for years to come. Some on social media are suggesting these steps show that for once policy-makers have placed health above the economy. But the rampant global spread of COVID-19 is likely a result of many governments' reluctance to take the necessary steps at a far earlier stage, including because they did not want to spook markets. Those steps would have included widespread testing, contact tracing, and more adequately preparing health care settings for COVID-19 patients. Health care systems throughout Europe and North America have struggled to mount adequate public health and clinical responses, with facilities overwhelmed, basic testing and protective gear in short supply, and care triaged to those with the best chance of survival. 3 These failures are exposing deep vulnerabilities and inequities within universal health care systems in high-income countries, raising tremendous concerns about what this pandemic will mean for health systems in low and middle-income countries and for the roll-out of universal health coverage (UHC).

Pravni zapisi, 2020

The year of 2020 will certainly be in all future books on the history of epidemiology and the Covid-19 pandemic will be discussed in them as perhaps the most significant public health challenge since the Spanish flu. But I also hope that it will feature as a new chapter in the books on health and human rights. The suffering of millions of people around the world, the deaths and medical challenges have already presented many lessons to learn from. One of the lessons should be to recognize the right to health as a full-fledged human and constitutional right that deserves a much closer attention whenever annual budgets are drafted and it should be considered as a fundamental human right without which no other rights can be exercised in epidemiological crises and even after that.

BMJ Global Health

To mitigate the spread of COVID-19, governments throughout the world have introduced emergency measures that constrain individual freedoms, social and economic rights and global solidarity. These regulatory measures have closed schools, workplaces and transit systems, cancelled public gatherings, introduced mandatory home confinement and deployed large-scale electronic surveillance. In doing so, human rights obligations are rarely addressed, despite how significantly they are impacted by the pandemic response. The norms and principles of human rights should guide government responses to COVID-19, with these rights strengthening the public health response to COVID-19.

Asian Bioethics Review

As the sustained and devastating extent of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic becomes apparent, a key focus of public scrutiny in the UK has centred on the novel legal and regulatory measures introduced in response to the virus. When those measures were first implemented in March 2020 by the UK Government, it was thought that human rights obligations would limit excesses of governmental action and that the public had more to fear from unwarranted intrusion into civil liberties. However, within the first year of the pandemic’s devastation in the UK, a different picture has emerged: rather than through action, it is governmental inaction that has given rise to greater human rights concerns. The UK Government has been roundly criticized for its inadequate response, including missteps in decision-making, delayed implementation and poor enforcement of lockdown measures, abandonment of testing, shortages of critical resources and inadequate test and trace methods. In this ar...

Laws

The purpose of this article is to assess the impact of the UK government’s response to the Covid-19 outbreak from a human rights perspective, particularly its apparent tension with Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) in relation to non-Covid-19 patients whose lives were put at risk by not being able to attend appointments and treatments for pre-existing conditions and illnesses. The UK has also rejected the application of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union with the European Union Withdrawal Act 2018, which will leave the population even more exposed to potential human rights violations. This seems to be a direct consequence of the narrative and slogan employed by the government: “Stay Home; Protect the NHS; Save Lives”. Other potentially threatened categories, the NHS staff and prisoners are also mentioned in the same context. The latter have already launched a judicial review application along the same lines: Article 2 of the ECHR and th...

Journal of Human Rights

Policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have impacted a range of human rights, with the pandemic being used to justify police violence, authoritarian power grabs, and corruption. Health systems in high-and low-income countries have struggled to provide adequate COVID-19 testing, tracing, and treatment, with non-COVID-19 healthcare-restricted, vulnerable populations at high risk of infection and negative health and social impacts, and lockdowns exacerbating poverty, domestic violence, and mental health problems. If underresourced health systems are overwhelmed by COVID-19, and individuals are forced to bear testing and treatment costs, there is a stronger likelihood of health system failures, for higher mortality from a range of causes, and for people to be pushed further into poverty and insecurity. COVID-19 thus underscores the urgent need for clearer rules about legitimate restrictions of the right to health in responding to the pandemic, and for safeguarding global health policy initiatives in its aftermath. This article focuses on key right-to-health challenges, including realization of universal health coverage, and potential challenges in access to future COVID-19 therapies and vaccines. We conclude with reflections on what the pandemic may mean for the evolution of human rights, and the right to health in particular.

The Lancet, 2020

The Lancet

When the history of the COVID-19 pandemic is written, the failure of many states to live up to their human rights obligations should be a central narrative. The pandemic began with Wuhan officials in China suppressing information, silencing whistleblowers, and violating the freedom of expression and the right to health. Since then, COVID-19's effects have been profoundly unequal, both nationally and globally. These inequalities have emphatically highlighted how far countries are from meeting the supreme human rights command of non-discrimination, from achieving the highest attainable standard of health that is equally the right of all people everywhere, and from taking the human rights obligation of international assistance and cooperation seriously. We propose embedding human rights and equity within a transformed global health architecture as the necessary response to COVID-19's rights violations. This means vastly more funding from high-income countries to support low-income and middle-income countries in rights-based recoveries, plus implementing measures to ensure equitable distribution of COVID-19 medical technologies. We also emphasise structured approaches to funding and equitable distribution going forward, which includes embedding human rights into a new pandemic treaty. Above all, new legal instruments and mechanisms, from a right to health treaty to a fund for civil society right to health advocacy, are required so that the narratives of future health emergencies-and people's daily lives-are ones of equality and human rights.

The right to the best quality of healthcare is guaranteed by international human rights law, and as a result, States are compelled to take the necessary governmental actions to realize that objective. Considering the nature of such a pandemic, States must specifically pledge to be protectors of public health and offer healthcare to everyone. At the same time, the international human rights law also provides for the governments feasibility to put some restrictions on the application of human rights when it is essential to protect the rights of bigger groups of citizens. The COVID-19 global pandemic has created unusual circumstances that have resulted in greater limits on human rights than would often be the case, both in terms of their magnitude and their duration. A public health emergency, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, is a humanitarian emergency since everyone has the right to health. Yet, perceptions about the impact of COVID-19 epidemic on human rights seem to have differed greatly among rights, time, and countries. This paper tries to give a look into how the pandemic has affected various human rights.

International Journal of Human Rights in Healthcare, 2023

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the close relationship between the disciplines of law and health-care studies. This interrelation has become particularly evident during the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, when restrictive human rights provisions have been initiated by many states for the sake of public health. Research focuses on the notional proximity of the principle of proportionality and its health-care correlative: effectiveness. It also goes through the influence of acceptance rates for the application of restrictive measures. Design/methodology/approach Research focuses on interdisciplinary literature review, taking into consideration judicial decisions and data on acceptance rates of restrictive human rights measures in particular. Analysis goes in depth when two categories of restrictive human rights measures against the spread of the pandemic are examined in depth: restrictive measures to achieve social distancing and mandatory vaccination of professional groups. Findings Restrictive human rights measures for reasons of public health are strongly affected by the need for effective health-care systems. This argument is verified by judicial decision-making which relies to the necessity of health-care effectiveness to a great extent. The COVID-19 pandemic offers a laminate example of the two disciplines’ interrelation and how they infiltrate each other. Research limitations/implications Further implications for research point at the need to institutionalize a cooperative scheme between legal and health-care decision-making, given that this interrelation is strong. Originality/value The originality of this paper lies on the interdisciplinary approach between law and health-care studies. It explains how state policies during the pandemic were shaped based on the concepts of effectiveness and proportionality.