‘Covid-19 is also a human rights crisis’

While it started as a public health emergency, the new coronavirus pandemic is rapidly turning into a human rights crisis, warned United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres in a report released on Thursday. He cautioned authoritarian governments not to use the COVID-19 as a pretext to trample on human rights or repress the free flow of information.

The rise of hate speech, the targeting of vulnerable groups, and “heavy-handed security responses” are undermining concerted efforts to contain the spread of the unprecedented health emergency ravaging the world, Guterres said.

While his report specifically cited government responses to the pandemic as “disproportionate” in China, India, Hungary, Turkey, and South Africa, human rights advocates here have been raising parallel concerns and protests over the Duterte government’s actions and pronouncements, as well as on actions by the military and police forces enforcing the Luzon-wide  enhanced community quarantine.

In his Thursday evening address to the nation shown on television yesterday, President Duterte again warned he might declare martial law – “and there will be no turning back” – should the New People’s Army continue attacking government soldiers.  He reacted to military reports of alleged NPA attacks and killings of Philippine Army soldiers assisting relief operations to people in the countryside adversely affected by anti-COVID 19 quarantine measures.

While there is a need to curtail people’s freedom of movement, Guterres conceded, the scale of such restrictions can be reduced by effective testing and targeted quarantine measures.  He pointed out more than 130 countries have closed their borders, with only 30 of them allowing exemption for asylum seekers.

At the same time, the top UN official lamented that journalists, doctors, healthcare workers and activists or political opposition leaders have been arrested under the pretext that they had been disseminating fake news.  The best solution, Guterres advised, is for governments to be transparent, allowing the opposition or civil society groups to scrutinize online their government’s actions.

Meantime, the issue of releasing certain categories of prisoners to help curb the spread of the COVID-19 by way of decongesting overcrowded jails regained focus this week both in the United States and in the Philippines.

In the US, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), in collaboration with epidemiologists from Washington state and from the universities of Tennessee and Pennsylvania, warned in a study that sustained “mass incarceration” could add 99,000 deaths due to COVID-19.  The study focused on 740,000 inmates in jails across 1,242 counties that account for 90 percent of people in the United States. (The US accounts for 22 percent of the world’s prison population.)

The predicted deaths among them due to the deadly virus would constitute 23,000 inmates and 76,000 residents in surrounding communities.  Because almost 11 million persons are sent to prison yearly, with a relatively high incidence of underlying health conditions such as diabetes and asthma, “jails could act as incubators for the disease to be spread widely both inside and in local communities,” the Guardian quoted the report as saying.  The spread in the communities could be facilitated by visitors of the inmates and by the short-term inmates – with average stay of 25 days, with many cases requiring only a day or two stay – after their release.

ACLU’s conclusion: The lesson of the research is that mass imprisonment has become a major health threat to all Americans, not only to those in prison.  The solution: reduce the jail population as soon as possible.

An earlier report in the Guardian in early March already raised the dangers of COVID-19 spread posed by mass incarceration in the US. It quoted Josiah Rich, director of the Center for Prison Health and Human Rights as saying: “The more people behind bars, the more [coronavirus] transmission you are going to have.”

The easy fix to such risk, Rich pointed out, is to release inmates who are jailed only because they can’t afford to pay cash bail.  “They are not there because we need to keep society safe; they are there because they are too poor to afford bail.”

That observation may as well apply to the situation in the Philippines.

In that regard, Amnesty International once more added its voice and moral suasion to the many international and local human rights groups which have been calling on the Duterte government to heed the urging by UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet on March 25 “not to forget those who are in prison.” “The consequences of neglecting them are potentially catastrophic,” she warned.

The government has acknowledged that on April 18 jail authorities transferred 40 inmates from the Quezon City Jail to an isolation facility, after 9 inmates and 9 prison staff tested positive for COVID-19. On April 21, at the Correctional Institute for Women in Mandaluyong City, where  a 72-year-old inmate was confirmed to have contracted the virus, 18 more prisoners  and one prison staff have tested positive.

Yet over a month since various quarantine measures took effect, the Amnesty International recalled, the government has yet to take concrete steps to decrease the prison population.

The human rights organization explained that some 75 percent of the total prison population in the Philippines as of 2018 were pre-trial prisoners. “International law requires that imprisonment pending trial should be the exception, not the norm,” AI stressed.  But “Philippine detainees spend years in pre-trial detention, which is a routine and harsh practice.”

AI recommends the following steps: 1) Take immediate measures to decrease the prison population, for instance by considering early, temporary or conditional release of those most at risk of COVID-19 infection: the elderly and sickly detainees, those held in pre-trial detention; 2) immediately release all those detainees solely for their peaceful exercise of human rights; and 3) consider non-custodial penalties for people charged with minor offenses.

All those to be released should have access to medical attention and health care of the highest attainable standards, AI concluded.

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