Article by Diane Desierto. EJIL:Talk! Blog of the European Journal of International Law.
May 25, 2020.
Human rights were already under siege everywhere around the world before COVID-19. But there is also a dawning race now against reaching the ‘twilight of human rights law’, due to: 1) authoritarian regimes’ dismissal of the relevance of human rights while using this pandemic to expand and consolidate their power, such as to silence speech, quash dissent, dismantle media, or execute mass arrests, detentions, or shootings; 2) the growing prevalence of utilitarian reasoning that instrumentalises human rights as just a set of ‘costs’ that can only be met by a privileged few; and 3) the resurgence of the age-old relativist attacks on ‘universal’ human rights, seeking to recast the latter as mere forms of ‘Western neo-imperialism’ against today’s new hegemonic powers such as China.
Crises – natural or man-made – are conducive for normalising the open, as well as the latent and creeping, lawlessness of ubiquitous human rights violations around the world. They also lay bare a continuum of hard policy choices for most local levels of leadership, parliamentary and presidential systems of government, as well as the array of primarily State-driven international organisations within our multilateral system. What tends to be neglected in the myth and mayhem of public and private decision-making to “build back better” during and after natural or man-made disasters, however, is that none of us can afford to pause testing and justifying any such decision or response against our mutual commitments to respect, protect, and fulfil each person, group, community, and population’s human rights. Neither can we afford to wait to do this ‘after’ the crisis has supposedly passed, and long after reconstruction and rebuilding plans are well underway. There can be no life of actual human dignity without building human rights into any vision of a post-COVID future.
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