Individual Freedoms (Civil Liberties) in a Health and Climate Crisis: Reflections on the Totalising Ideology of Human Rights

Abstract

Introduction. The article analyses the problem of the restriction of human rights and freedoms in the modern conditions of the environmental and health crisis created by the COVID-19 pandemic. Theoretical Basis. Methods. The study uses a formal and dogmatic approach to the analysis of the normative legal framework of the European system of human rights and freedoms. A comparative legal analysis made it possible to identify both the general and the specific as regards the restriction of rights and freedoms in the states of the European Union. The article presents an analysis of the decisions of the Court of Justice of the European Union, and the High Courts of both France and Germany that were rendered in connection with the environmental crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic Results. The starting point for the author’s analysis of the research topic is the classic conclu- sion that human rights have experienced a golden age since the late 1960s with the end of the communist utopia and the establishment of the model of liberal democracy. In the social sphere, the emancipation of morality freed a person from social and family structures that determined his place and role in the family and society. In the economic sphere, the neo-liberal revolution made it possible to fully realise economic freedoms. The European legal system has accompanied and implemented this golden age. COVID-19 and the environmental crisis have led to unprecedented restrictions on the exercise of rights and freedoms. Discussion and Conclusion. The foregoing has allowed us to draw the following conclusions. Hu- man rights are ideology. Like any ideology, its goal is totalising. As soon as we leave the field of law (a normative approach) in order to use law to promote values (an axiological approach), ad- vocates of human rights and freedoms finally abandon serious legal science. The totality of free- doms has become somewhat conditional. By standardising their methods, their implementation will depend on a set of permanent and universal constraints. A new paradigm of human rights and freedoms has emerged, which is built around “rights-duties”.