The effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on human rights practices: Findings from the Human Rights Measurement Initiative’s 2021 Practitioner Survey

Abstract

Health is a human right; as such, a public health crisis is a human rights crisis. Yet the human rights impact of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic seems to have varied widely, both across rights and across countries. How have human rights practices been affected by the pandemic so far? Which human rights were most negatively affected by the COVID-19 pandemic? Which states were most likely to experience these negative effects, and which states avoided a reduction in the enjoyment of human rights due to the pandemic? To provide some early answers to these questions, the Human Rights Measurement Initiative (HRMI) added questions to its annual practitioner survey that aimed at determining how a subset of civil, political, economic, and social rights was affected by COVID-19 in 2020 in 39 countries around the world. Using both quantitative and qualitative data from this survey, in combination with other indicators, this article provides a description of COVID-19’s human rights impact as seen by practitioners on the front lines around the world, as well as insight into the larger question of which factors enabled states to maintain a high level of enjoyment of human rights just when those rights were needed the most.

Notes

Notes

1 For a review of the literature on the relationship between human rights and the COVID-19 pandemic, see Chiozza and King (2022b) in this volume.

2 See Bakker et al. (2014) for more discussion of the use of anchoring vignettes, and Clay et al. (2020) for discussion that places that use in the human rights context.

3 A paper version of HRMI’s 2021 survey (which is taken in Qualtrics) can be viewed in full in Appendix 1, included with the replication data at the Journal of Human Rights dataverse.

4 We exclude freedom from the death penalty from this analysis, as death penalty executions occurred in only four countries in our sample over the 2019–2020 time period.

5 It may bear mentioning that there is a mechanism in international law that would allow states to derogate from some of their obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) during COVID-19 related crises. However, many more states restricted the exercise of civil and political rights than entered derogations at the United Nations (Helfer, 2021). Indeed, in our sample of states (which includes some countries that have not ratified the ICCPR), Kyrgyzstan is the only state of which we are aware that entered formal derogations to its ICCPR obligations during 2020 (United Nations, 2020).

6 As suggested by an anonymous reviewer, all of this is further complicated by the possibility that limitations on some rights, including those permitted via legal derogation procedures, may have served to reduce the caseload in some countries. In the current study, it is possible that worse practices on some rights served to decrease the COVID-19 caseload, which may serve to attenuate the generally negative correlations we find between COVID-19 cases and change in these broad categories of human rights outcomes. Future researchers with access to more disaggregated data should evaluate this possibility further.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

K. Chad Clay

K. Chad Clay is the Director of the GLOBIS Center and an Associate Professor of International Affairs at the University of Georgia. He is also the Co-Founder and Methodology Research and Design Lead of HRMI. He received his PhD in 2012 from Binghamton University. His research focuses on the measurement, causes, and consequences of human rights practices and conditions.

Mennah Abdelwahab

Mennah Abdelwahab is a recent graduate of the University of Georgia, obtaining degrees in international affairs and journalism. Her research interests include human rights, political repression, and the Middle East region.

Stephen Bagwell

Stephen Bagwell is an assistant professor at the University of Missouri -St. Louis in the department of political science. His research focuses on the economic consequences of governments behaving badly, development, and statistical methodology.

Morgan Barney

Morgan Barney is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science and International Affairs at the University of Georgia. She completed her BA degree in International Studies from Covenant College in 2018. Her research focuses on human rights, international NGOs, discourse shift, and issue framing among international actors.

Eduardo Burkle

Eduardo Burkle is a research analyst at the Human Rights Measurement Initiative and holds a MA in Human Rights and Democratization from the Global Campus of Human Rights. His research interests include transitional justice, human rights, and far-right populism in contemporary politics.

Tori Hawley

Tori Hawley is an LLB student at the University of Liverpool. She received a BA in International Relations from Western University in 2020. Her research interests include human rights and international criminal law.

Thalia Kehoe Rowden

Thalia Kehoe Rowden is Strategy and Communication Lead with the Human Rights Measurement Initiative. She holds a BA in Linguistics and LLB(Hons) from Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand.

Meridith LaVelle

Meridith LaVelle is a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science and International Affairs and the Director of the GLOBIS Human Rights Research Lab at the University of Georgia. She is also a member of HRMI's Civil and Political Rights team. Her research interests include human rights, international human rights law, political violence, contentious politics, political economy, and quantitative methodology.

Asia Parker

Asia Parker is a Ph.D. student in Political Science and International Affairs at the University of Georgia. Her research focuses on human rights, women's rights, advocacy, foreign aid, feminist theory and qualitative methods.

Matthew Rains

Matthew Rains is a Ph.D candidate in the School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Georgia. He is also HRMI's CPR Metrics Lead. His research focuses on oppression, human rights, political violence, and measurement.