By Salma Mohamed, Solidarity Now, Advocacy Intern
COVID-19, an infectious disease that was first detected in December 2019 in Wuhan, China, has had and will continue to have widespread and devastating impacts on numerous facets of everyday life, from the economy to human rights. The global pandemic, in particular, has highlighted many human rights failures, exasperated them, and enabled governments to utilize the infamous and pervasive pretext of national security to push bigoted agendas that target historically marginalized groups and are inconsistent with international law principles
According to an April 2020 United Nations paper analyzing COVID-19’s implications for human rights, three core rights are being challenged: the right to life and the government’s duty to protect, the right to health and access to healthcare, as well as the right to freedom of movement (which underpins many other important rights).
Not only are marginalized groups more likely to get infected and face harsher symptoms of the novel coronavirus because of underlying disparities in healthcare, accessibility, housing, etc. but also are more likely to be adversely affected by measures intended to mitigate its spread for similar reasons, thereby severely deepening existing inequities and further hampering core human rights. This, in a sense, is ‘double victimization,’ which many social justice activists and scholars have identified marginalized groups often endure when crises ensue or facially-neutral policies are enacted.
The April 2020 U.N. report notes that people of low socioeconomic status, women, older people, children, racial, ethnic, and religious minorities, migrants, refugees, and internally displaced persons, indigenous people, people with disabilities, prisoners, detainees, and others who are deprived of their liberty, LGBTI people, HIV-positive people, and people who use drugs are all cohorts facing an onslaught of challenges to their basic rights. For example, people with low socioeconomic statuses (which often intersect with other marginalized groups) face higher infection rates and experience worse symptoms of the virus due to lack of housing, food security, access to water, and decent healthcare, etc. Additionally, as the report notes, the lockdown measures have further restricted access to food, education, work, and basic services, all of which impact people of low socioeconomic status harder because of their already limited resources.
Instead of fulfilling their obligations under international law and countering this discrimination, some governments have capitalized on the fear surrounding the virus as well as the global rise of xenophobia and authoritarianism and utilized the perilous pretext of national security to perpetuate prejudiced agendas. While, of course, some restrictions to human rights are necessary to curtail the spread of the virus, these restrictions should be and must be, according to international law, strictly circumscribed with security reasons or national emergencies as well as proportionate and non-discriminatory. Amnesty International identifies numerous instances around the world where the human rights of refugees, in particular, are unduly hampered under the auspices of protecting the public, from water supplies being intentionally cut off in a Bosnian refugee camp, thus forcing relocation, to the United States suspending most due process rights for migrants and turning back over 20,000 people. Although states use the rhetoric and ideology of national security, their actions often do not mitigate the spread of the virus. These measures sometimes even lead to more movement and thus increase the risk of COVID-19 spreading. As such, these practices are non-circumscribed, disproportionate, and discriminatory, thus in violation of international law.
States need to face extra scrutiny on their human rights records in times like these where fundamental rights are opportunistically and occasionally abused. Marginalized communities are often the targets and remain the targets even after the crisis has subsided, as evidenced by the illegal surveillance and detention of Muslims during and after the ‘war on terror’ in the United States.
These challenges to core human rights principles set a dangerous precedent and the international community must take punitive action against the perpetrators accordingly.