By Michael Tomlinson September 1, 2026
In 2020, governments around the world panicked in response to the declaration of a pandemic and imposed drastic interventions to impede the spread of Covid-19, interventions which crushed human rights on an unprecedented scale and without sufficient justification. Yet this was widely accepted, even by human rights organisations. How could this happen? And how could we amend human rights protections to ensure that it does not happen again?
In the aftermath of the Second World War, there was recognition that rights should be codified, leading to the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These rights are taken to be universal and inalienable.
The Declaration includes declaration of the rights to ‘life, liberty and security of person,’ freedom from torture, equality before the law, freedom of movement, including ‘the right to leave any country including his own, and return to his country,’ freedom to own property, freedom of thought, opinion and expression, freedom of assembly, and the right to education.
These are a mix of fundamental rights and other categories. Fundamental rights are everyone’s birthrights originating in fundamental capabilities or states of being which we all have unless we are actively prevented from exercising them by others.
We do not need to apply for permission to exercise this type of right. The classic case of a fundamental right is freedom of expression. We all have this capability as soon as we can speak (or sign), and no one should take it away from us.
Freedom from torture is fundamental to health and well-being and again is the natural state of being unless torture is inflicted on us.
Freedom of education is in a different category, as education by its nature needs to be provided by someone, a government, or a private organisation, which costs money. There is no fundamental right to have education provided without contributing to the cost of it through fees or taxes, but where it is provided it should be accessible to all on an equal basis. So, this right is really about equity.
Commendably, the Declaration does not include any qualifications to fundamental rights, although it is understood elsewhere that:
They should not be taken away, except in specific situations and according to due process. For example, the right to liberty may be restricted if a person is found guilty of a crime by a court of law.
No one would dispute this exception: even the most libertarian of countries puts people in jail if they break the law (but authoritarian countries have laws that put people in jail for reasons that would never be acceptable in truly democratic counties, for example, insulting the President). Once the possibility of wider exceptions is recognised, however, abuses become possible.
The best justification for exceptions is where someone exercises their own right by contravening someone else’s right. Even in the case of free speech, one of the most fundamental of all rights, it is universally accepted that it is not permissible to advocate for or incite violence, especially against an ethnic or religious group. The most notorious examples of this over the last hundred years have been the Nazi campaign of vilification against the Jews, which led directly to their killing around six million Jewish people in the Holocaust, and the Hutu government incitement of the population against the Tutsi (‘cockroaches’), which led to at least 800,000 deaths. In these cases, a direct line can be drawn between incitement and genocide. In other cases, incitement is more coded and difficult to prove.
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