The ‘Vaccine’ of Human Rights: Issues, Concerns and Compliance with Basic Human Rights during COVID-19 Health Pandemic in India

Abstract

Health is the foremost aspect of human life and existence with its complete dimensions of physical, mental and social health. Right to health has found its apt place as an ingredient of the sacrosanct and topmost right to life in the scheme of fundamental rights within the constitutional interpretation and in the international human rights law as an indivisible right. In the web of rights that form right to life, woven by the various judicial interpretations and international conventions, this right cannot be visualised in the unprecedented crisis of COVID 19 pandemic, without explicit and exclusive references and considerations of other related human rights. The author has developed a compliance framework from global best practices inspired by the United Nations guidelines and their contextualisation in India. Applying the parameters of legal epidemiology, a unique conceptual framework, the author emphasises how the existing fault lines of socioeconomic inequalities and vulnerabilities in the form of gender, age, class, prisoners and location along with policy blind spots and gaps in the governance system exacerbate human rights violations or non protection, thereby arguing for a comprehensive approach centre-staging right to health, therefore right to life. Recommendations are suggested for India, from this perspective.