Human and Civil Rights and Freedoms in a State of Natural Disaster and Epidemic Emergency
Human and Civil Rights and Freedoms in a State of Natural Disaster and Epidemic Emergency

Summary/Abstract: On 11th March 2020, the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared a state of pandemic. In turn, on 21 March 2020,the Minister of Health, by way of a regulation, declared a state of epidemic in the territory of the Republic of Poland. At thesametime, the decision resulted in the introduction of many restrictions concerning, inter alia, freedom of movement, assembly andtrade. At the same time, discussions started on the constitutionality of the introduced restrictions on civil liberties. Having theabove in mind, the aim of this article is to present the correlation in the sphere of limiting or suspending civil liberties ina stateof emergency, such as a state of natural disaster, and in ‘non-emergency’ states, such as a state of epidemic threat and a stateof pandemic. Although the word ‘state’ appears in the three mentioned legal situations, the state of natural disaster, as oneof the three constitutional states of emergency, creates a different legal and socio-political situation than the state of epidemicthreat or the state of pandemic. A common feature of the above-mentioned events, however, is that they became a fundamentaldisruption of the social context of individual and group functioning in connection with the occurrence of a human infectious disease

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