Constitutional Resilience and the Covid-19 Pandemic

This volume makes an important contribution in two ways to the wider scholarly project of understanding how the pandemic and government responses affected the foundations of constitutional government in democratic societies. In the first place, it offers a broad perspective on key international trends in the first year of the pandemic, based on our own observations of government practice and reading of the guidance and academic literature. In the second place, the volume offers a regional perspective on the issue from sub-Saharan Africa by relating expert studies of practice in ten different countries in the region to the observed global trends. Our aim in both cases is to add to comparative legal scholarship by establishing a conceptual bridge between national practice in ‘pandemic governance' in this region and corresponding trends in international practice, as well as a legal bridge between national constitutional law related to public health emergencies and international health and human rights law. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.

Constitutional and Human Rights Issues Arising from Covid-19 in South Africa

South Africa announced a national lockdown on 17 March 2020 following the outbreak of Covid-19. Its approach to the pandemic has been based on a patterned model in which restrictions imposed in terms of the Disaster Management Act are categorised in degrees of intensity ranging from level 1 (least intense) to level 5 (most intense). In the period between the first wave of infection in early 2020 and the second wave in January 2021, the country moved from level 5 to level 1 before shifting to level 3. A surge in infection numbers led to three restrictions as of 17 June 2020 and again in 2021. There is no doubt that various sectors of the population have been adversely affected, among them women, children and the elderly. This chapter evaluates the response to the pandemic by South Africa's executive, Parliament and judiciary, and analyses its implications for constitutionalism. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.

Constitutional Resilience and the COVID-19 Pandemic: Perspectives from Sub-Saharan Africa

This book explores the resilience of constitutional government in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, connecting and comparing perspectives from ten countries in sub-Saharan Africa to global trends. In emergency situations, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, a state has the right and duty under both international law and domestic constitutional law to take appropriate steps to protect the health and security of its population. Emergency regimes may allow for the suspension or limitation of normal constitutional government and even human rights. Those measures are not a license for authoritarian rule, but they must conform to legal standards of necessity, reasonableness, and proportionality that limit state action in ways appropriate to the maintenance of the rule of law in the context of a public health emergency. Bringing together established and emerging African scholars from ten countries, this book looks at the impact government emergency responses to the pandemic have on the functions of the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary, as well as the protection of human rights. It also considers whether and to what extent government emergency responses were consistent with international human rights law, in particular with the standards of legality, necessity, proportionality, and non-discrimination in the Siracusa Principles. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.