Human Rights and Structural Inequality in the Shadow of COVID-19 – A New Chapter in the Culture Wars?

Abstract

This paper takes structural inequalities of societies as its starting point and premise to assess the state of health of the international human rights legal discipline as it confronts the global pandemic. By way of a couple of case studies, it asks whether international human rights law and its institutions are in fact equipped with the ‘tools’ for the task, and explores how the discipline has reacted to a grassroots political movement, rights-related but not rights-framed, pushing for recognition of racism as a public health crisis. It then considers the conservative backlash to these developments, and asks whether we are entering a new stage of the culture wars around the language, method and assumptions of the discipline.

Keywords: international human rights law, pandemic, COVID-19, public health