COVID-19: Law and Human Rights: Foreword

COVID-19: Law and Human Rights: Foreword Conor Casey and Oran Doyle ‘I need to speak to you about coronavirus and COVID-19.’ It is now twenty months since then Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, speaking from Washington D.C., addressed the nation in these terms.1 Over those twenty months, we have all learned more about the threat posed by COVID-19 to health and well-being, and how medical science has responded to that threat. But we have also learned much about how communities work together to protect one another from risks to public health. Law has been to the fore of those community responses. It allowed people to coordinate their behaviour to limit the spread of the virus. It provided the framework for supporting those whose wellbeing was undermined by general restrictions on ordinary human activity: familial, social and economic. But legal values – particularly human rights and the principle of legality – were frequently threatened by aspects of that very same legal response. In June 2020, the Law School at Trinity College Dublin established the COVID-19 Law and Human Rights Observatory to explain, analyse and critique Ireland’s legal response to COVID-19.2 We published blog posts that tracked the day-to-day changes in the law, while drawing together a range of international, comparative and interdisciplinary perspectives on those legal developments. We produced reports that critically analysed different aspects of the state’s legal response to COVID-19, including public health issues, supports for families and businesses, human rights and equality issues, labour law issues, and digital privacy. We are honoured to have been asked to contribute to this volume of Studies, highlighting some of the principal themes that have animated our work over the past twenty months. There has been much to commend in Ireland’s legal response to COVID-19. In these articles, we focus on some principal lessons to be learnt for the future, whether for a future public health crisis or more generally. Patricia Brazil critically assesses how direct provision centres fared Studies • volume 110 • number 440 405 during the pandemic, crowded conditions facilitating the spread of disease. It is greatly to be hoped that current plans for reform are speedily implemented. Alan Brady and James Rooney assess the disruption of education provision during the pandemic, assessing not only the substantive restriction of education rights but also the fact that such restrictions were implemented by ministerial decision-making rather than by legislation. Mark Bell reviews the right to disconnect, partly in the light of Roman Catholic social teaching. While working from home has brought with it desirable flexibilities for employees, it also produces a dangerous pressure to be ‘always on’. This is the next frontier in employment rights. Hilary Hogan reviews the openness of the EU to Keynesian economic measures in the current crisis, in stark contrast to the financial crisis of the previous decade. Hogan suspects ‘political pragmatism, rather than any major break with the EU’s underlying ideology’. Finally, with David Kenny, we explore how the rule of law was tested by the state’s approach to legislation: blurred boundaries between law and guidance, combined with misleading official accounts of legal positions, made it very difficult for citizens to know the extent of their legal obligations. At the time of writing, there remains considerable uncertainty over the likely trajectory of infections. The highly successful vaccination drive has reduced the health risk posed by the virus. But we have certainly not yet moved past the pandemic. Indeed, we may never return to the world of 2019. The work of the Observatory and the essays published in this volume make one small contribution to our understanding of this new world and how to navigate the challenges it presents. Dr Conor Casey is Lecturer in Law at University of Liverpool School of Law & Social Justice Dr Oran Doyle is Professor in Law at Trinity College Dublin. He is an expert in comparative constitutional law, and he contributes regularly to public debates on issues of constitutional law in Ireland. Notes 1 ‘Taoiseach’s full statement: “I need to speak to you about coronavirus”’, RTÉ, 12 March 2020, available at https://www.rte.ie/news/coronavirus...