Redefining security perspectives under the weighting of rights due to COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

Faced with the COVID-19 pandemic, countries deployed all their human and institutional capacities to prevent their populations from being seriously affected. This led to notice the prevailing positions and structures within each State and to redefine the path they were willing to adopt to enforce their vision of government and nation, both within their territories and abroad.

What is the role of the State in relation to their human rights obligations in unexpected and urgent contexts, and what are the scopes for fully guaranteeing them? This article attempts to highlight that some measures adopted by countries to protect their citizens from the coronavirus limit the full exercise of human rights.

Although, in a material way, some have opted for the use of information technologies, which collect data without permission from their citizens and use them to identify their affinities and social spaces, in reality, these strategies come from the definitions and priorities that are held about what security implies.

Thus, we see that some contexts are more favorable than others for the dissemination of narratives that seek, in practice, to bend the full guarantee of the exercise of fundamental rights of people, even when those have been offered as a response to the urgency of the COVID-19 crisis.

For this reason, it is considered pertinent to take an approach based on the doctrine of conforming interpretation, in order to dispel these doubts about the alleged tensions between which are the fundamental rights to be protected, which should be restricted, and how far the State's powers should be extended.