Cultural AnthropologyRobin Kirk, Senior Lecturer in Cultural Anthropology and Co-Director, Duke Human Rights Center
Human rights are central to the emergence of and responses to pandemics. The fundamental right is the right to life, supported by other rights, including the right to health. Other rights—like freedom of movement or speech—can be limited in times of pandemic, in order to protect communities from infection or harmful information.
What’s key is that any government response to pandemic be proportional to the risk of spreading disease. In the case of COVID-19, as Prof. Katherine Sikkink has written, “our collective right to health takes precedence over individual rights to freedom of movement. To protect our collective right to health, people need to stay at home and self-isolate.”
In other words, we do not only have rights. We have duties to each other.
How governments approach these rights varies widely. Currently, Brazil’s federal government is refusing to adopt measures recommended by health experts. In contrast, governors in 24 of 27 states have adopted stay-at-home rules. Others have taken advantage to push through authoritarian measures unrelated to health, among them Victor Orban in Hungary. In South Korea, the right to privacy was curtailed as a powerful—and seemingly effective—tool to slow and halt spread.
Most striking during pandemics is how they reveal pre-existing and profound failures in rights protection in terms of housing, jobs, and access to basic services and health care, among other things. If societies paid more attention to upholding rights, pandemics would be more manageable and less deadly.