13 May 2021

Research pick: Human rights in the post-pandemic world - "The idea of a human rights-based economic recovery after COVID-19"

Can we embed human rights in our economic recovery after the COVID-19 pandemic? That is the hope discussed in a paper published in the International Journal of Public Law and Policy. Katharine Young of Boston College Law School in Newton, Massachusetts, USA, explains how COVID-19 pandemic has plunged the world into an unprecedented health and economic crisis and will require an unprecedented approach to recovery.

“As economists and policymakers turn to the task of recovery, protecting human rights remains intrinsically important, both morally and legally. It is also instrumental to the ends of public health and economic resilience,” Young writes. She argues that that the human rights to life, health, education, social security, housing, food, water and sanitation, are as essential as civil and political protections.

The COVID-19 pandemic has wrought inevitable indignities and material deprivations, the recovery should ensure that those deprivations are not simply propagated in the post-pandemic world. Economic and social rights must be respected in the aftermath of the pandemic. Moreover, our recovery must build on our history and understanding of past social and economic crises and go beyond those lessons to renew our commitment to ending inequality in all its forms.

“…a human rights approach does not offer a singular, uniform policy prescription,” Young adds. “Instead, it offers the parameters of accountability and participation that have been a known feature (or at a least goal) of the United Nations human rights regime since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”

Young, K.G. (2020) ‘The idea of a human rights-based economic recovery after COVID-19’, Int. J. Public Law and Policy, Vol. 6, No. 4, pp.390–415.

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