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Jo Shaw
or place additional weight upon the negative effects of border closures on certain groups, such as
migrants or transnational families.37 These are all factors which will be built into the analysis.
The general focus in the following sections is on what might be termed the “linear effects” of
COVID-19 in relation to matters of citizenship, that is to say, on the types of measures that might
ordinarily be expected in a public health emergency for the purposes of saving lives or ensuring the
availability of health care. For example, if public offices are closed or certain types of administrative
processes are curtailed because of social distancing or other measures of infection control, then we
must expect there to be impacts upon different dimensions of the citizenship principle. Both democratic and authoritarian regimes are likely to take such measures, but such measures may have
differing meanings according to context. While the impacts on citizenship that emerge from public
health and public order measures may be typical governmental responses to the pandemic and are
not necessarily the products of the political dynamics of populism or authoritarianism, in fact such
impacts are or could become problematic insofar as they may lead to major and even permanent
changes to the constitutional dynamics of citizenship that have not been subject to proper scrutiny by
elected representatives or consented to by the public itself.38 They therefore need to be individually
assessed against standard national and international public law criteria around accountability, which
themselves should have regard to questions of equality. Inevitably some measures and practices will
be good, some will be bad, and some will be just what is normal.39
An underlying concern of the article is to consider how we may be able to challenge the impacts
of COVID-19 on citizenship in the light of legal and constitutional standards. It is easy to see that
there are a number of areas which could, in the future, be subject to legislative or judicial intervention, for example, to protect the rights or status of certain minority or vulnerable groups, in the
light of principles such as equality and human dignity. Indeed, “human rights” approaches to
studying the pandemic and contesting its consequences abound.40 Measures such as the
Siracusa Principles on the Limitation and Derogation Provisions in the International
Covenant on Civil and Political Rights,41 which have been discussed in the extensive literature
assessing the COVID-19 pandemic from a human rights perspective,42 may become increasingly
important for such assessments. It may be the case in the long term that durable and wide-ranging
change is more likely to flow from political rather than judicial action.43 This may also be more in
keeping with the political weight accorded to the oft-quoted mantra of “build back better,” a
phrase which stems from United Nations led work on disaster management44 but which has
Joe Hasell, Bobbie MacDonald, Diana Beltekian, Saloni Dattani & Max Roser, Coronavirus Pandemic (COVID-19), https://
ourworldindata.org/coronavirus.
37
Gerard McCann & Féilim Ó hAdhmaill, International Human Rights and Global Welfare in the Midst of the COVID-19
Pandemic, in COVID-19 IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH: IMPACTS AND RESPONSES 29 (Pádraig Carmody et al. eds., Bristol Univ. Press 2020).
38
Joelle Grogan, States of Emergency: Analysing Global Use of Emergency Powers in Response to COVID-19, 22(4) EUR. J.L.
REFORM 338 (2020).
39
See B. Guy Peters, Governing in a Time of Global Crises: The Good, the Bad, and the Merely Normal, 1 GLOB. PUB. POL’Y
AND GOVERNANCE 4 (2021). See also Thomas Plümper & Eric Neumayer, Lockdown Policies and the Dynamics of the First
Wave of the Sars-CoV-2 Pandemic in Europe, J. EUR. PUB. POL’Y (2020), https://doi.org/10.1080/13501763.2020.1847170.
40
Stéphanie Dagron: Going Beyond the Rhetoric: Taking Human Rights Seriously in the Post-COVID-19 New Paradigm,
VERFBLOG (Mar. 27, 2021), https://verfassungsblog.de/going-beyond-the-rhetoric-taking-human-rights-seriously-in-thepost-covid-19-new-paradigm. For a methodology for studying human rights impacts, see Martin Scheinin & Helga
Molbæk-Steensig, Pandemics and Human Rights: Three Perspectives on Human Rights Assessment of Strategies Against
COVID-19, (EUI LAW Working Paper, 2021), https://hdl.handle.net/1814/69576.
41
INTERNATIONAL COMMISSION OF JURISTS, SIRACUSA PRINCIPLES ON THE LIMITATION AND DEROGATION PROVISIONS IN
THE INTERNATIONAL COVENANT ON CIVIL AND POLITICAL RIGHTS (July 1, 1984), https://www.icj.org/siracusa-principles-onthe-limitation-and-derogation-provisions-in-the-international-covenant-on-civil-and-political-rights/.
42
See , e.g., Nina Sun, Applying Siracusa: A Call for a General Comment on Public Health Emergencies, 22 HEALTH & HUM.
RTS. 387 (2020).
43
Jens O. Zinn, Conclusions: Towards a Sociology of Pandemics and Beyond, 69(4) CURRENT SOCIO. 603 (2021).
44
Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030, UN OFFICE FOR DISASTER RISK REDUCTION (2015), https://www.
undrr.org/publication/sendai-framework-disaster-risk-reduction-2015-2030. For commentary in relation to COVID-19, see
https://doi.org/10.1017/glj.2021.77 Published online by Cambridge University Press