Championing human rights amid disease and discrimination

Thoko Moyo: Hello and welcome to the Harvard Kennedy School PolicyCast. I'm your host Thoko Moyo. Joining me today are Kennedy School professors, Mathias Risse and Jacqueline Bhabha, both at the Harvard Kennedy School Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. Now throughout history, governments have used crises to consolidate and cement power yet while some official actions like restricting movement, ramping up surveillance, curtailing freedom of assembly and closing borders can be a cause for concern, they're also helpful in trying to manage and control catastrophes such as the current COVID-19 pandemic. Professors Risse and Bhabha say that while some of these measures may be temporarily necessary to prevent loss of life, safeguards must be put in place to make sure human rights are not eroded over the long-term. In the case of the COVID pandemic, they said care must be taken to protect vulnerable populations who are most at risk and at both a pandemic and the current intense focus on systemic racism and police brutality in America show the necessity of protecting the rights of all people. Professor Risse is the faculty director of the Carr Center and his work focuses on global justice and the intersections of human rights, the climate crisis, inequality and technology. Professor Bhabha is an expert in public health, particularly involving children and vulnerable populations. She's also an internationally known human rights lawyer and a lecturer at the Harvard Law School. Welcome to PolicyCast both of you.

You're both scholars and researchers in human rights and as you think about the pandemic and you look at the moment that Britain and America, what are the sorts of things that you're thinking about? Let’s start with you Mathias.

Mathias Risse: I'd say this is a very striking moment in an American history, really striking writ large. Both the pandemic and the protest that resulted from the death of George Floyd really point to a lot of underlying vulnerabilities and equalities as you said and they don't only bring to the fore that people are differentially affected by both public health issues and by the potential of state for us to turn violent and not live up to the task for which it ought to be designated but it also really brings to the fore these different underlying narratives about this country. I think one reason why people are so angry right now is because there is just such a lack of willingness to actually talk about American history and we're getting drowned in this rhetoric of glory and make America great again, and so America was great and was only great and... not that I personally would want to deny that America has many great things to show for itself but there is a variety of narratives. There is a very complex history in which some people have lost out dramatically beginning with native Americans, African Americans who were brought here in chain, the native Americans who were subject to a genocide. It was just white people making clear that they wanted to be certain places and wanted certain services and they just basically just made it happen no matter what happened to other people and there's an unwillingness to talk about that. There's an unwillingness to reckon with the past and that brings people to the street at the same time when we are also seeing the consequences and the phenomenology of the underlying injustice manifest itself in the pandemic. It's really... It's a striking confluence of all of these underlying weaknesses from a social justice standpoint that are so characteristic of this country and that many people are just so unwilling to even address.

Thoko Moyo: Jackie, let me come to you. You focus on international human rights, primarily. As you look at what's happening in the U.S., what are you thinking about in relation to human rights but also the pandemic that is a constant in everything that we're seeing with regards to the protests that are going on now in the United States and around the world.

Jacqueline Bhabha: Thoko, I think I'm seeing at least three things. First, I'm seeing how structural racism has really manifested itself. If you like this summer or this spring and Summer in America for all to see which so many people had not been aware of before surprisingly, it's really the point Mathias made. It is surprising that given what we know about dramatic racial inequality in America, given what we know about the ongoing legacy of slavery, I would say, it is the pricing that this isn't an acknowledged fact. It's surprising that the disproportionate impact of COVID on people of color, African Americans, Hispanics primarily, took people by surprise. It's odd. It's very surprising that this should not be an acknowledged fact about America like it was an acknowledged fact about apartheid, South Africa. Nobody denied it. Some people might've said it was the right thing to do but nobody denied it. I think that's odd. That's really surprising. That's my first thought.

My second thought is that this really shows the urgency of reparations. I do really think that reparations for state harm are urgently called for, both for slavery and what happened after the end of slavery and also for a series of other major state injustices to do with colonialism and so on and we have a book coming out which I've edited together with three other colleagues here at Harvard, which is called in title the Time for Reparations? And it'll come up this fall. That's the second thing I think of. I think that reforming the police, instituting new regulations, getting rid of choke holds are all very overdue reforms, but I think they are really small fry compared to the systemic issues that this country is facing. In a way you might say police brutality is nearly an epiphenomenon of underlying structural racism because African Americans in this country are targeted because they're poor, because they're disproportionately in congregate settings because so many things come together, and so police brutality is one of them. It's not a coincidence though, it's not an aberration. It is not a few bad apples. We really need to now push on with this discussion about reparations and think what reparations mean. It's not an easy discussion. There's not a simple way of fixing things by... obviously it's not a question of making individual payments to individual survivors though that means some cases help. It's much more about thinking about how a national GDP is distributed more equitably across different communities. Third thing I would say is that through this period of real darkness for many months with an administration that surprises us every day by an even more obscene set of positions and comments, and then an illness that has been terrifying and has taken such a heavy toll.

It is also a moment of hope. It's a moment of, I feel optimism about this country and I agree with Mathias. There are many things about America. Both he and I are foreigners. There many things about America which are admirable, but there are many things which certainly from a European perspective are also surprising and dark. This moment of seeing so many people, young people, people of color but also white people and middle aged people coming out with this outpouring of anger and dismay, for me has been very encouraging. Actually I would say that my mood has significantly lifted despite the horror of the killing, despite the anxieties about the pandemic. My mood about the political future has actually lifted and I feel very inspired by the current virtue of so many people despite the fears of pandemic but they come out carefully with masks and social distancing as much as possible to make their views known. Those are my three reactions.

Thoko Moyo: And I think you've both raised some really important points that I think are part of the conversation right now. What you said about reparations and the issue of defunding the police, et cetera. I think those are all big issues and I think one could actually have very interesting podcast discussions about each one of those ideas that speak to the systemic racism here and some practices and policies that have led again to this moment in America where you're seeing riots, protests against injustice and a sense that there's been an inadequate response. But I think we should probably keep this podcast very focused on the issue of human rights and the pandemic and explore some of the... sort of broader issues around that even as we know that there's quite a huge moment in America now and so my next question will be around how do you actually get people to focus on human rights during a pandemic when the nature of a pandemic is that you're fearful for yourself. You're fearful about the public health issues. How do you bring that angle of human rights into the conversation?

Mathias Risse: Let me maybe start by saying, one thing that I think is so horrible about situations of that pandemics is that basically everybody... people you encounter on the streets, people you see around, you easily actually stop seeing them as human beings in their own right and with their own standing and you mostly see them as potential containers of a disease, right? That is what is so horrifying. I had about, especially if you think of pandemics with a much larger mortality rate and this finance and that particular regard is even worse than warfare. I mean, not that warfare is anything going for itself but at least in warfare, some are people are... they're making decisions, right? And you can kind of come to an understanding with people. They are making choices and you can reach them, right? And here we are all kind of fading away into some kind of a bit of nature that comes with viruses, and we are trying to navigate around each other and I think that has a substantial potential for really dehumanizing human interactions quite dramatically. It really is a time where we just have to constantly remind ourselves, there is a person, there is somebody with a story, there is somebody who has a future hopes to have a future and that standards of human dignity that have been so difficult to come by. A hard one over the decades and centuries that right now in spite of all the precautions we need to take, they really matter and we just... I think that's in a way a key thing. We need to remind ourselves and each other. We need to be reminded by our leadership that it's in times like these that human dignity really needs to come into its own.

Thoko Moyo: Jackie, give an example of some of the things that you're concerned about as Mathias says that start to emerge sort of dehumanizing of people during a pandemic. What are some of the things that we're seeing that we need to be aware of?

Jacqueline Bhabha: I think we're seeing lots of examples of this kind of fear of contamination by the other, as if the other nearly by definition is somehow a polluter. We've seen this in the context of borders, which I know we'll talk about more. We've seen this in the context of stigmatizing already stigmatized populations. In Europe, for example, one of the largest groups is stigmatized populations, still kind of very accepted is the Roma population and we've seen an enormous resurgence of vicious hate speech, not only hate speech, but hate acts, hate crimes against Roma people. Simply as a kind of catalyst for the fear and the hostility that people feel, which is exacerbated and multiplied in a time like this where people's levels of anxiety about the unknown are heightened.

But if I could, I just wanted to go back to the question that you asked Mathias, which is how do you get people who are inclined to be very self-focused at a time of danger to think about others. I think the two answers that I would give. One is I would give a very pragmatic utilitarian answer, which is if you don't care about others, you're really reducing the risks of your own safety, because even though we know that this disease has a greater impact on some parts of the population than all others, contamination can spread to anybody. If you don't care about certain populations and you think, well, they don't really deserve information, they don't really deserve access to healthcare, you are increasing the body of contaminants in your own societies. There is really a utilitarian argument so just saying inclusion is a healthy measure, I would say. That's one point I'd make. The second point I'd make is that nearly everybody, nearly every family has someone who is an other in it. Whether it's an elderly person, a nursing home. Whether it's a person with a disability in a mental institution, whether it's an immigrant or foreigner. Any attempt to really exclude whole big chunks of the population is likely to rub up against some people who are in your own clan, and so I think those are two reasons why you might be able to appeal to a greater sense of inclusion amongst people than we otherwise have, but I do think Mathias is absolutely right that this is a critical area for leadership. Maybe that's one of the few ways in which the analogy with war works. You need leadership.

Thoko Moyo: Though I think part of the challenge has been that this idea of excluding certain people, being fearful of certain people seems to fall into the idea of protection. For instance, I know there's been reports of cases in Africa of Chinese people being targeted as in, this virus and we've had leaders say this virus came from China and so people see it as a public health response to try and close off people from China, and similarly in China you've had Africans being treated badly for the same reasons. I think part of the challenges, and correct me if I'm wrong, is that some of the messaging around how you respond to the pandemic by sort of closing off and isolating does seem to give almost a credence to this idea of some people are more dangerous. Mathias, you want to say anything about that or anyone ... I know it's about leadership but I'm curious to hear what else you might want to add to that.

Mathias Risse: Yeah. It is about leadership. I mean, I'd rather not bring the leadership in connection to the war here. There's been some interesting reflection also in some obit, in some studies about how especially countries led by women... some of the countries that have been quite successful at dealing with this phenomenon so far, like Germany and New Zealand. The countries led by women have avoided that rhetoric all together and we find this coming from Trump of course, and [McColl 00:16:18] was big on the war thing. I see the connection to the talk about war... I think about war mostly does, it's creating this us versus them and them. I mean, the way we understand war, them is other humans. This would actually be... I mean, a global pandemic is like the premier opportunity to say, "Look, there is actually a common enemy here, right?" This goes after, and not just to kind of say this and make it sound like the others disagreeing with, but it's has been like the president unfortunately does, but really just to say we can pull resources here. We have a lot of great researchers across many countries here. A lot of capacities and we are not going to... In a way, this is kind of a writ large version, a global version of what Jackie was saying about the clan, the family context. We are not going to have a flourishing economy at the global scale in an era of globalization when countries are not... when they're not all up and running, and we need them all up and running and so we need a sense of leadership that says, "This is a moment for humanity to really pool its resources." Practically speaking, we need a lot of phone calls among leaders, a lot of networking among disease specialists. Just a lot of communication and a lot of appeal to saying this could be a fine hour for humanity rather than a moment of divisiveness with finger pointing. I mean, who really... who cares where it started. We have it now.

Thoko Moyo: And humanity, isn't really rising up to the challenge. In fact, Mathias, you've written that when we look at governments that every day during this pandemic, governments around the globe are absorbing more powers and there's a real possibility and I think we're seeing some examples of abuse of power. Can you give some examples of places in the world where you're seeing this happen?

Mathias Risse: Well, two examples that come to mind immediately of course, are Hungary and China. Hungary has been going on for quite some time that Viktor Orbán and his parties are basically seizing every opportunity to assume more power and ever more uncontrolled ways. Hungary is one example. The one that I worry substantially more about because of the enormously larger technological capacities involved is China. China has surprised everybody in the last five, six, seven years anyway, by building this massive surveillance system for a population of what, 1.4 billion, that they managed to impose control mechanisms on them in order to consolidate the rule of the party, is truly astonishing and they have now been going through... we all are going through a period of compulsory digitalization. Currently I'd sped up a compulsory digitalization and in China, they have really seized the moment to control the population yet more tightly through the utilization of health data and I think this is the essay truly Orwellian scenario on the radar here in terms of the kind of access and tracing capacities that the government exercises over its people, which could really be done in completely different ways. It doesn't have to be done this way, but China I think is really a scary example of government usurping power through technology.

Thoko Moyo: But how do you do it differently? Because one of the hopes that people have right now for... I'm actually getting control of this pandemic is the use of technology, being able to use technology to do the contact tracing, to do the monitoring. How do you do it in a way that respects human rights and privacy of people?

Mathias Risse: In the European Union, they're sort of thinking around that also going on right now. As you probably know, the European Union is much more preoccupied with protection of privacy and data. Has been a lot of legislation in different countries and also at the EU level itself and so they're taking this very seriously for a good reason and in terms of this particular technological issue, so basically for tracing. I mean, if it's just about tracing, right? The immunity passports would be a different thing if you need to connect health data to particular people, but tracing can just be done if your smartphones know which other smartphones are around. Suppose I'm getting the news that I'm infected today and I was out on the ballot yesterday and my smartphone through a particular app would have registered which other smartphones were around which can be done without connecting them to particular people, then these smartphones would be getting notifications once I provide the information that I'm infected. In this way, there would be kind of peer to peer messaging that is going through the smartphones and that would not involve any governmental data collection. There are ways of doing that.

Thoko Moyo: And so your concern is around the data being collected and held by government lest the technology... actually collecting that data for the purposes that is intended.

Mathias Risse: Yeah. The concern is that government is using the opportunity to deploy technology in the enhancement of its powers rather than in the enhancement of public health whereas smart minds should be reflecting more about how exactly a technology should be... can be used here for the public health benefit without tunneling such possibilities to government.

Thoko Moyo: I want to keep on this just for a little longer, because I know in the U.S. just after 9/11, Congress passed laws that gave sweeping powers around surveillance and again, that was done in the interest of safety, so sold to the American people as this is one way that would prevent something like this happening. I imagine if we had a representative from the Hungarian government or from the Chinese government, they would be saying that all these measures are being taken primarily with the concerns of the citizens in mind. At which point do we become suspicious that yes, that's true, but this is going overboard and it may be repeating some of what you've said, but I do want to bring in the counter argument that some people may feel safer knowing that that data is being collected. How do we address it? And Jackie feel free to jump in as well if you want to sort of comment on that as well.

Jacqueline Bhabha: Well, maybe I can just say that, I think that government is a big box, and there are good governments and bad governments. A central government, the state government, there's very local governments and I think there is a case to be made for a role for government where that government is embedded in trust, community trust. I think there is an opportunity here for governments actually to get this data, the tracing data and other data and use it to understand, for example, which messaging techniques by authorities work better to get people to stay at home or to socially distance and which messaging techniques work less well. There's a lot of course of positive outcomes we can derive from data. The question is how it's used and how we as citizens feel about it. I think that Mathias's example of Hungary and China really identifies two countries which have extremely authoritarian governments in a whole range of different domains and where there are broad sections of the population who don't feel that sense of trust. If you switch gear to countries like... I don't know that much about New Zealand, but Germany, for example now, I don't think that Germans feel that sense of lack of trust. On the contrary, I think they feel very proud of a government, has been science informed on a daily basis, that has been completely transparent and that is really trying to use data in a forward looking way.

The same, I think, can be said for another government which has a very senior female leadership and I take Mathias's this point about women leaders, which has Kerala the South Indian state of Kerala done incredibly well and which is actually kind of used very aggressive testing and tracing to contain the virus. What's interesting about Kerala of course, is it's a state embedded in a country where the opposite has been true. Where there has been a real abuse of power where the lockdown has been used in a very authoritarian way. Some say nearly like a death sentence. You can see within a government different governance entities behaving differently. In this Kerala context, I think people feel safe just like maybe some people did feel safe in the 9/11 context. The onus is on the authorities to be transparent about how they are generating safety. If they say, well, we're generating safety by using scientific data to understand better X, Y aspect of human behavior it's very different from saying we're using scientific data to go off to these miscreants or to go off to these illegal immigrants.

Thoko Moyo: And then how do you think about this in the context of people who'd argue that this is an emergency and right now the focus has to be in doing whatever it takes, however it takes to sort of control this and we'll come to the human rights privacy issues later. Could that be a valid argument? How would you respond to that?

Jacqueline Bhabha: Maybe I'll just say something fast and then Mathias I'm sure will have no useful reflections in addition. My point is that if you don't have trust and if you abuse people's sense of their own self-worth, you're going to be undermining the collective effort that we need to really address this issue sensibly. If official messages become suspect, and we see this in the U.S., how the messaging has been very unsuccessful. We see now kind of mixed messaging about whether you can open, whether you can't open. Different people are doing different things. If you're not establishing a consensus about the legitimacy of the message built on people's sense of being respected and being treated as dignified beings, your ability I think to control social behavior and to change social behavior is going to be severely impacted. For example, if you say to the poorest of the poor, you have to exercise the kind of total lockdown because it's in the interest of everybody to prevent social contamination and you don't provide food and you don't provide shelter and you don't provide access to healthcare, you're going to generate a reaction which is actually going to be deleterious for the whole society.

Thoko Moyo: And Mathias you wanted to add to that.

Mathias Risse: Yes. I mean, in terms of the emergency, I think it's just... maybe in terms of your question Thoko. What if somebody says, well, there's this one thing that matters right now. I think that's possible and you'll find some historical examples where someone make sense to say, it's only this one thing that matters and everything else needs to be very single-mindedly aligned behind that, but normally... I mean, politics under enormous circumstances and even emergency time politics is rarely like that. Of course you have challenges that need to be mastered in this case. We need to deal with the virus but there's always a complexity of issues and Jackie's absolutely right. You need to understand the nature of this effort is that people need to be moved along. They need to comply. That means they need to understand, they can't be alienated from the process, they need to get what is required and that automatically means we're not just going after one thing. We're not just optimizing on somehow getting these numbers down, focusing just on that without looking at what's happening in society because that's kind of self-defeating, right? Single-mindedness here is self-defeating for the reasons that Jackie mentioned.

And I also as a German citizen, I appreciate of course, Jackie's reference to Germany here. I think it is actually really quite striking the high level of discourse. The high quality of discourse there, the way the government was communicating with the citizens, the way the government also made clear everything depends on compliance of the citizens, the way the scientists were involved by providing information but it was also always clear that politicians are making the decisions. All that also, I think allowing for a lot of dissent coming in and of course, there's different views about where to, what to reopen, how fast, and all of that. There were ways of doing that. I think actually in Germany, by and large, democracy is emerging strengthened through this and there's other countries. One can think of here, but I'm afraid in the United States it's not like that.

Thoko Moyo: When you look at this, you almost wonder that ... when we talk about trust and we talk about sort of advancing democracy during this period in some countries, it almost makes you wonder if this pandemic isn't sort of exposing weaknesses that existed before. Sort of in your work in human rights. I mean, that's being laid bare. Would you agree with that? And do you want to just say a bit more about that?

Mathias Risse: A few weeks ago we came to a point where one quarter of all, no one recorded corona death cases where America had one quarter, but now it actually the share is higher and the disproportionate share of those were minorities which indicated the extent to which all sorts of social vulnerability is, what kind of jobs people do, where they live, what kind of medical preconditions they have. All of that factors into this. One thing that really kind of scared me then when I reflected on this number of one quarter which is really stunning number, a one quarter of all recorded death is American. Right? Is that this number one quarter, we are also familiar with from a different context, namely one quarter of all people who sit in a prison anywhere on this globe sit in an American prison, and again, the same factor's true of that number also that the disproportionate share, again, minorities, people of color. I mean, we have these stunning numbers. I know obviously that this is one quarter in this case and that case, there's no magic here, but I think one needs to take a big step back from that and say, what is with the overall health and just broadly conceive the political health, the social health of the society given that we are doing so poorly by these global standards.

Jacqueline Bhabha: Well, I was just going to completely agree with Mathias and add just some specificities. According to a recent piece that some colleagues of mine wrote, whereas 13% of Americans are African American, 30% of people who have been hit by the coronavirus are, so it's like over double what you would expect in terms of the population ratio and there's a similar, not quite so dramatic difference for Latino. I think your point about pre-existing inequities and how, in a way COVID-19 acts as the magnifying glass is very well taken.

I think the other point though, is people in institutions. Mathias mentioned prisons. Also, of course, the elderly, the very poor levels of care. I mean, of course we know elderly people are more susceptible to the virus but the disproportionate impact on elderly people in institutions, I think says a lot about how... talk about the states as a rich society, we deal with some of the most dependent and vulnerable populations and so this really does shine a light on issues of inequity, injustice, and misallocation of social resources like I think few other things have in my lifetime.

Thoko Moyo: Let's talk about what would the policy response be, because you're not arguing that individuals or the market come up with solutions. You're saying there's definitely a role here for policymakers to be intervening here. What would those policy responses be?

Jacqueline Bhabha: I would start with two points. One is the imperative of an inclusive message and this goes back to the point about leadership. I think it's very important to have messaging, public messages from leaders at all levels emphasizing the value added of including everyone in the access to the response, not stigmatizing, not excluding some populations. That's the first thing, and the second point I would make is that I think decentralization and community level impact is the name of the game. This is a global pandemic, but the most effective responses are going to be heavily contextualized and local. It's not one size fits all, and so we talked about Germany. You do have to target the quarantining. I mean, imagine if we had said everybody has to stay at home, even health workers, even food shops. We haven't done that. We've had some very minimal targeting, but we need to have much more targeting, and there are some issues which the science alone will not help us with. What do you do about schools? Parents can't go back to work if kids are at home and now this evidence is emerging that maybe there's some... we thought kids were hyper protected and now in the last few days, there are these scary stories about a particular form of the virus which has a very serious, apparently not lethal generally, impact on children. These are political decisions that communities have to be engaged with. I think I would say that you need to have very strong democratic fora for discussing complicated issues because science alone can just guide, but it cannot decide.

Thoko Moyo: Mathias, what's your sense in terms of the types of policy responses that you think are going to be important in this moment?

Mathias Risse: Well, everything that Jackie said, I will totally underline of course, myself. I mean this in a somewhat more, what kind of needed hands on to get a grip on that. I think we just need to substantially build test capacities. We need to have reliable ways of actually, to go back to the German case for a moment, they say Every day on German television, you hear now this number, what they call the R value or the reproduction rate of the virus, which is basically how many people one infected person is infecting, right? And you want this to be below one so that then the disease is kind of in decline, right? Having a number like that means there is a substantially high quality statistical understanding of what you have, right? And you can get to that only if you have widespread enough testing to come to data situation like that. We need to come to an understanding like the that. We need to have a statistical grip on the situation and then we need to find ways of kind of targeting particular people, finding ways of tracing others so that when people are diagnosed they... people, they can be traced and we need to have an infrastructure in place, a support system in place which means here at the state level of social policy a system in place that allows people to actually exit the workforce for a certain time without fearing that they were suffering any kind of disadvantage, right and there needs to be broad support for all of that, right? These are the kinds of public health measures that we need, but that is really in a way, the hands on version for what Jackie's actually emphasized as this message of inclusion, right? This really is something, and also really going back to a point that Jackie made at the very beginning. We need to understand that this is a problem that each of us will have as long as everybody else has it, right? And so we just need to really... it's a classical problem where we need to work on this together and create a sense of we're in this together.

Thoko Moyo: Terrific. Just a really fascinating conversation. Thank you so, so much both of you.

Thoko Moyo: Thanks for listening. Please join us for our next episode, and if you want more information about our podcast, please visit us at hks.harvard.edu/policycast.