Article 15 derogations: Are they really necessary during the COVID-19 pandemic?
Kanstantsin Dzehtsiarou · European human rights law review · 2020
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, a few human rights academics argued that human rights can be better protected if the governments derogate from international human rights mechanisms during the pandemic In doing so, these governments clearly separate the regime of emergency from normalcy and hence they limit in time the measures they adopt to fight the pandemic Article 15 allows such derogations from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) In this short contribution I question the fundamentals of this argument First, the quarantining effect of derogations is often proven by references to military emergencies I argue that health emergencies are substantively different from the military ones and it is incorrect to draw direct parallels between them Secondly, I argue that human rights enshrined in the ECHR have a “natural quarantining effect” and Article 15 derogations are unable to change the Court’s approach to human rights during the pandemic significantly © 2020 Thomson Reuters and Contributors