International human rights organization Amnesty International has announced the deterioration of the human rights situation around the world during the COVID-19 pandemic. This is reported by TASS with reference to the organization's annual report, published on Wednesday, April 7.
As Amnesty International Secretary General Agnes Callamar said, the world is in chaos, and politicians can no longer deny that “social, economic and political systems have collapsed.”
“The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically exposed and exacerbated inequalities within and between countries, and demonstrated our leaders' blatant disregard for human values,” she explained.
According to Amnesty International, the pandemic has particularly affected ethnic minorities, refugees, the elderly, women and the LGBT community. Europe and Central Asia have been hard hit by the pandemic, with morbidity and mortality accounting for nearly a third of the global total.
The text says that the authorities in a number of countries in Europe and Central Asia are using the pandemic to expand their powers, suppress freedoms and ignore human rights obligations. The authors of the report also argue that due to the pandemic, a state of emergency was declared in many countries, and at least ten states have deviated from the provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights. In a crisis situation, such steps were considered acceptable, but human rights activists insist that the restrictions should be “temporary, necessary and proportionate.”
Also, human rights defenders came to the conclusion that a number of countries, in particular Hungary, Poland, Romania and France, abused existing and new legal norms in order to “restrict freedom of expression”.
Earlier, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported an increase in deaths due to COVID-19 in the world. According to the WHO, the number of victims of the coronavirus in the world over the past week increased by 11 percent – more than 71 thousand people died. At the same time, the organization records an increase in the number of infected people for the sixth week in a row – over the past seven days, more than four million new cases of COVID-19 have been detected.
In October 2020, the US State Department suspected a number of human rights organizations of anti-Semitism. The US Foreign Office is considering declaring Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and Oxfam anti-Semitic. Amnesty noted that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is the fundamental document of their work, was formulated in response to the atrocities committed against the Jewish people.
