When pandemics strike the key problem is: how to ensure that human rights and public health priorities are equally respected? THEMIS addressed this issue through investigation of the role of courts (judicial review) in ensuring human rights-based approaches to pandemics. The project is important for society as it offers new knowledge about normative standards for assessment of human rights guarantees in infectious disease control and epidemics, raises societal awareness about human rights and health, and provides a vital reference for policy-making in responding to global challenges of health threats.
The project started with the following facts and scholarly observations: fuelled by international mobility, risks of epidemic outbreaks are increasing. National and international public health responses to limit the spread of diseases are often characterised by treating health as a sharp security issue, using risk of health threats for political means, and governing by causing societal fears at the expense of the protection of human rights. As a result, the rights of individuals and populations are/can be infringed, as they are often assumed to be obstacles to public health. Possible violations concern the rights to life and personal integrity, freedom of movement, respect for private and family life, and specific patients’ rights. The significance of THEMIS became particularly visible in face of the global Covid-19 pandemic which began in December 2019. The pandemic generated public health restrictions on an unimagined scale and caused huge, human rights-related implications world-wide. It also caused a massive number of rights-based claims and litigation. In reaction, and prescient, to these developments, the project examined case-law because judges are often both the first to be approached by those seeking justice and well-placed to stand up to government actions.
THEMIS’s core objective was to develop the first map of the standards of review applied by courts in EU and US when resolving conflicts involving individual human rights and public health protection in global pandemics. In order to establish how judges approach these conflicts, the project’s scholarly objectives were: to discover what is the role of risk, public health, epidemiology and gender in EU/US judicial reasoning, and compare how courts construe lawful human rights limitations. These findings will be presented in a book manuscript resulting from this project. In terms of social and policy engagement, where the impact of the project can be located, the aims of the project were: to discuss the significance of judicial standards in pandemic preparedness with experts and foster the inter-disciplinary, cross-sectoral and transatlantic debates; to convey knowledge of the human rights role in fair pandemic preparedness to targeted lay public.
