States' Response to the COVID-19 Health Crisis - Emergency Powers vs Human Rights
States' Response to the COVID-19 Health Crisis - Emergency Powers vs Human Rights

Author(s): Sanja Kreštalica
Subject(s): Law, Constitution, Jurisprudence, Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, Governance, Health and medicine and law
Published by: Правни факултет Универзитета у Источном Сарајеву
Keywords: Human rights; Emergency powers; Derogation; ICCPR; ECHR; ACHR;
Summary/Abstract: The sudden outbreak of the global pandemic caused by the spread of the new coronavirus confronted the international community with many challenges. The current pandemic has triggered health, economic and social crisis, that pushed a great number of states into the grey zone when it comes to human rights protection. Dozens of state parties to the three main human rights treaties, namely the ICCPR, the ECHR, and ACHR, have exercised their emergency powers by calling for derogation of one or more human rights protected by the above mentioned treaties. Declaration of the state of emergency, followed up by the notification to the relevant bodies of the UN, or regional organizations, even though completely legal, opened the door for possible abuses of the situation for political purposes. States closed their borders, banned religion, movement, and other freedoms, proclaimed new legislation, all to combat the global threat coming from the invisible enemy.This paper aims to analyze the states' response to the COVID-19 health crisis, in the context of the derogation from their obligation to secure rights and freedoms outlined in the human rights treaties. With the outbreak of the global pandemic, the international community changed its face overnight. By questioning the behavior of states in time of the pandemic, the author suggests that there has been a change of the paradigm so that the individual human rights protection does not stand equal with the need of a wider community or a state as such. Therefore, the author concludes that the postmodernist ideas of the unquestionable subjectivity of individuals faced the wall of state-centrism.

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