Oran Doyle is Professor in law at Trinity College Dublin.
COVID-19 presents an unprecedented public health crisis. New laws were introduced at a rapid pace on the basis of compelling public health and economic concerns. Many of the laws infringe on our most fundamental values, while some impact most harshly on disadvantaged groups. Furthermore, if laws are to be effective, they must be well drafted and clearly communicated to the people.
Universities—and the legal academy in particular—play a vital role in ensuring that laws are effective but also that rights and fundamental freedoms are protected insofar as possible, even in emergency circumstances. To address this, the Trinity Centre for Constitutional Governance has established the COVID-19 Law and Human Rights Observatory. Over the next four months, we will publish legal analysis in the form of blog posts, citizen-explainers, and public policy reports that will explain, analyse, and—where appropriate—critique Ireland’s legal response to COVID-19.
The Observatory draws on the academic expertise within Trinity Law School and more broadly to provide a deep analysis across the full breadth of Ireland’s response to COVID-19. The Observatory will cover both the measures introduced to manage the pandemic and the measures introduced to protect people’s livelihoods and the broader economy. Our experts work on areas as diverse as public health law, constitutional law, social welfare law, and financial services law. Human rights frameworks will be applied both to the measures adopted to manage the pandemic—in particular personal liberty and digital privacy concerns—and to the distributional concerns arising from various livelihood support measures.
The work of the Observatory is already well under way. Five blog posts have been published addressing issues from democratic accountability to the structure of the lockdown regulations, from the meaning of freedom to the experience of prisoners. These blogposts have drawn attention to worrying declines in parliamentary oversight, rule of law concerns around the lockdown regulations, and the tendency of the Government to blur the distinction between what is legally prohibited and what is the subject of public health advice.
The Observatory will pay particular attention to how vulnerable individuals and disadvantaged groups have been affected. We have entered a partnership with FLAC to help research and prepare two public policy reports, one focusing on access to justice, the other on disadvantaged groups and vulnerable people.
These Reports will make a significant contribution to public debate, but only if we can identify the issues that are really of concern. We are reliant on the members of PILA and others to draw to our attention issues that are cropping up on the frontline. Ideally, there will be an Observatory member working on the particular area who can provide a quick response, perhaps as a blog post. But this dialogue between practitioners and members of the Observatory will also inform the policy reform recommendations made by the Observatory.
As well as public policy reports, the Observatory will publish an eBook that provides a practitioner’s guide to Ireland’s Covid-19 response. We shall also produce citizen explainers, perhaps in the form of videos, that will contribute to public understanding and debate.
If there are issues that you think the Observatory should address, you can email us at covid.observatory@tcd.ie. We will do our best to respond to the issues you tell us about.