Human rights and freedom in times of Covid-19 : a comparative analysis of European subnational regions

Abstract

Since January 2020, European countries have been engaging in exceptional decision-making to limit the propagation and to address the consequences of the Covid-19. Such exceptional decision-making has seen the executive decide on the scope and legality of its powers, as well as impose restrictions on democratic processes, the rule of law, fundamental rights and civil liberties. In some European countries, the prerogatives of the police and the army have been extended to further enforce these measures. In other countries, a softer approach to crisis management has been pursued, mainly relying on citizens’ compliance, social norms, and peer pressure. Although initially strong, public support for emergency measures has eroded, as the severity of the pandemic has lessened. Throughout Europe, citizens and scholars are becoming increasingly critical about the democratic and human rights’ costs of the pandemic management. Moreover, exceptional measures can eventually affect human rights protection and democratic governance in the long term. If unaddressed, the observed decrease in public trust can reduce citizens’ compliance with public health measures and undermine democratic stability. This calls for the urgent research on the modalities, impacts and determinants of emergency decisions in crisis times. The novelty and the exceptional nature of this crisis calls for new theoretical and methodological approaches. The Exceptius project heeds this call by bringing together researchers from a large range of disciplinary fields to analyse the impacts of pandemic policy-making on human rights, the rule of law and democratic governance in established democratic systems. This panel addresses (sub-)national political decision-making in a variety of settings and over time through a diversity of disciplinary lenses, and bases itself on comparative case studies. At the methodological level, this panel combines quantitative (automated content analysis, natural language processing) with qualitative research approach to analyse the governmental response to Covid-19 crisis, the impact on the population, and various methodological challenges. Building on national and comparative case studies, the participants to this panel will address the following questions : 1) How can political scholarship explain the varying degrees of democratic and human rights resilience in pandemic times in Europe? 2) Which role political culture, political institutions and social inequalities play in shaping the depth of control used in the enforcement of covid-19 measures? 3) Which implications can be drawn from the Covid-19 pandemic for political science scholarship?

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