The Principle of Proportionality: Summary and Consensus in the 6th International Conference on Human Rights Protection Under Pandemic Prevention and Control, Beijing (China) 2020

Abstract

Against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic and China’s regularized pandemic prevention and control, leading legal scholars from China, North America, and Eurasia participated in The 6th International Conference on Human Rights Protection under Pandemic Prevention and Control. Participants engaged in fruitful discussions on the normative necessity and practical relevance of the principle of proportionality in justifying their current governments’ anti-pandemic measures. Focusing on pandemic-related human rights conditions and rule of law challenges in global contexts, this article summarizes the participating scholars’ speeches through the integrated lens of human rights and the jurisprudence of health law in the COVID-19 containment phase. Speeches can be divided into six topical dimensions, involving normative utility, governance logic, reasonable limits, constitutional criteria, viable approaches, and post-pandemic challenges with respect to the principle of proportionality. To provide a more policy-relevant and theoretically sound framework for a community of common health for mankind, this article succinctly concludes with a series of overlapping consensus on the application of the principle of proportionality in the fight against the pandemic. This consensus, tentatively named the “Renmin Human Rights Consensus,” builds on five interrelated elements and generates five human rights assertions and a series of specific principles of health law.

Keywords

anti-pandemic measures / COVID-19 containment phase / community of common health for mankind / proportionality analysis / human rights jurisprudence / Renmin Human Rights Consensus

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Higher Education Press