Of Limitations and Retrogression: Assessing COVID-19’s Impact on Children’s ESC Rights

Article by Aoife Nolan and Judith Bueno de Mesquita. The Global Initiative for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. May 26, 2020.

Article by Aoife Nolan and Judith Bueno de Mesquita. The Global Initiative for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

May 26, 2020.

On 13 May, UNICEF stated that the impact of COVID-19 on health systems and services meant that an additional 6,000 children could die every day from preventable causes. Compounding the direct and indirect health implications of the virus for children, there is growing recognition of, and concern about, the multidimensional effects of COVID-19 on the lives and well-being of children around the world. Employing language that has since been taken up by numerous domestic and global actors, UNICEF has referred to the pandemic as a ‘child rights crisis’. However, this crisis is not solely attributable to COVID-19 itself; rather, some aspects of state responses to the pandemic constitute restrictions or limitations on children’s rights, while others appear to amount to retrogression.

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