Serbia’s Compliance with Article 2(1) of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in Times of the COVID-19 Pandemic: Pandemic or Endemic?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 February 2022
Summary
ABSTRACT
As the COVID-19 pandemic spread to Serbia, the government took measures in order to mitigate its effects and protect the population from infection. However, some of those measures have had a detrimental impact on the enjoyment of economic, social and other human rights. Measures related to access to the right to education and social security of the most vulnerable have exhibited a lack of consideration and understanding of obligations under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR, the Covenant) to which Serbia is party, particularly in relation to the obligations stemming from Article 2(1) and 2(2). Many children belonging to particularly vulnerable groups, especially to the Roma national minority, were effectively leftwithout access to education as a result of the introduction of distance learning, while those most vulnerable members of society were not targeted by financial social measures, but rather were precluded from accessing additional financial aid that was made available to the general population. Having in mind the particular obligations incumbent upon Serbia stemming from the above-mentioned articles, the analysis below will illustrate the non-alignment of measures taken with those obligations.
INTRODUCTION
As the American historian, professor Frank Snowden pointed out at the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis, epidemics hold up the mirror to the social, cultural and political conditions in which they arise. Similarly, the state responses to the COVID-19 pandemic are the images in that mirror. These images show us the key values that guide the societies we live in and who is considered as a priority in times of the unprecedented global crisis. The COVID-19 infectious disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus has claimed over three million lives and infected more than 140 million people. Since the virus first spread from China outwards, was declared a public health emergency of international concern and then characterised as a pandemic, the majority of countries introduced measures limiting or derogating from human rights. Certain limitations to and derogations from human rights obligations being permissible in international human rights law and under certain treaties when the exigencies of a certain situation require it or are such that they threaten the life of a nation, states were quick to use that opportunity.
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- European Yearbook on Human Rights 2021 , pp. 381 - 404Publisher: IntersentiaPrint publication year: 2021