Covid-19, international human rights law and the state-corporate complex

This article engages with some questions at the nexus of COVID-19 public health responses, civil-political rights under international human rights law, and the responsible governance of data-driven technologies. In July 2020, several United Nations Special Rapporteurs attending the online RightsCon conference on ‘Human Rights in the Digital Age’ observed that the COVID-19 pandemic was driving a growing reliance by states on technologies of all sorts (for example, mobile-enabled COVID contact-tracing app technologies).1 The rapporteurs variously noted how this was resulting in dramatically increased unlawful surveillance, quelling of dissent, and the closing of civic space and collective action online and offline. Their view was that these ‘patterns of abuse’ were being ‘accelerated under the exigencies of the global pandemic.’2