Health resilience requires rigorous human rights assessment

Abstract

• Compliance with human rights is an important element of health resilience, generating popular legitimacy and trust, legality and legal certainty, and favourable effects for the economy. Crucially, it will save lives when societies will be confronted with new pandemics. • Comprehensive, structured and evidence-based assessment of national responses to pandemics for their conformity with human rights is possible. It requires a rigorous methodology. We have developed a model for COVID-19 (see, Chart 1) that can be verified and then adapted to future pandemics by defining those elements of the model that are constant and those that will need to be modified for a new epidemic. • A piloting exercise in respect of 17 countries and their performance during the second half of 2020 allows for a set of comparative observations (see, Table 1 for all grades and Table 2 for top-three and bottom-two countries). Most importantly, the pilot study supports the conclusion that strong human rights performance in respect of any category of human rights entails and requires general compliance across all categories of human rights. This conclusion reflects the principle of interdependence and indivisibility of all human rights. • A global study of the human rights compatibility of national strategies against COVID-19 in the course of 2021 should be commissioned, building on the expert assessment methodology applied in the pilot study. A clear objective should be included to produce a generalizable model that can be adapted to future pandemics, through a modular structure that allows for adaptation to the biological and epidemiological specificities of each pathogen and pandemic. • Such a model could become a self-assessment tool in addressing national strategies. Importantly, it would generate interaction between different epistemic communities such as epidemiologists, economists, sociologists and psychologists, lawyers and other experts on regulation, and human rights experts. Collaboration between national experts or functionaries in various fields would mainstream well-informed human rights considerations into national strategic decision-making on health emergencies. This would significantly improve health resilience.