Human Rights in a Pandemic

A Zhebit

doi:10.23932/2542-0240-2020-13-5-13

Abstract

The article is focused on the problem of human rights (HRs), limited or derogated from, due to the Covid-19 pandemic. While addressing some HRs limitations, derogations and even abuses, and their consequent problems, the aim is to try to analyze policy, social, moral and personal dilemmas of HRs restrictions as well as motivations behind the types of public and social behavior, in the course of the pandemic, in response to the public measures of sanitation, social distancing and confinement, travel restrictions and social assistance, recommended by the WHO and selectively followed by governments. Learning from some old experience and deriving new lessons from the pandemic, as well as from public and social actions and reactions, the purpose of the present article is to assess whether or not public health policies in this context, implemented nationally or internationally, can promote change in the HRs paradigm in the face of the existing dilemmas and dichotomies in HRs, aggravated by the pandemic. The conclusion is that the extant HRs paradigm should be redefined to address better the political, social, economic, environmental and, especially, existential exigencies of “rainy times”, thus leading to the creation of a new universal HRs code or to harmonizing the existing one.

Highlights

The article has been written in the midst of the pandemic Covid-19, without any definitive results and all known consequences of this world catastrophe
The accorded principles of the Vienna Declaration prove that the international community was driven by a common will to strike a holistic attitude to human rights (HRs), when formulating a nexus of interdependency of democracy, HRs law and development, appealing to states to abide by it: “5
All human rights are universal, indivisible and interdependent and interrelated.” ... and “... it is the duty of States, regardless of their political, economic and cultural systems, to promote and protect all human rights and fundamental freedoms.” “8

Summary

Introduction

The article has been written in the midst of the pandemic Covid-19, without any definitive results and all known consequences of this world catastrophe. Since the outbreak of the disease, that caught the world unawares, many developments are already known as well as some results of the fight against it provide enough evidence to permit reflection and analysis and to draw some tentative conclusions on the topic of the study. The present pandemic was preceded by an epidemic of the Ebola virus, a fatal coronavirus. It appeared in 1976 in two simultaneous outbreaks, one in Nzara, Sudan, and the other in Yambuku, Democratic Republic of Congo, in a village near the Ebola River, a borrowing to the name of the disease. The anti-Ebola vaccine, elaborated by laboratories in different countries, the first in Russia, reduced drastically the spread of the disease, helping to successfully control it, avoiding to transform the Ebola into a pandemic

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