My Covid-19 story: A tale of convergence, divergence, and more than law

Abstract

Over the past couple of years, the Covid-19 pandemic and response measures by governments around the world have significantly impacted existing inequalities and related human rights in most sectors, including education. Beyond the Covid-19 regulations and the implementation processes, the human rights impacts have largely been determined by extraneous factors such as personal characteristics (sex, gender, age, health, employment), the quality of the environment, and social, political, and economic systems within which the regulations are implemented. In this article, I reflect on my personal experience of the human rights impacts of the pandemic response from my position as a female academic having recently joined the higher education sector in the United Kingdom from abroad. Overall, the pandemic has been both an “equalizing” and “divisive” threat, due to a combination of converging responses and divergent outcomes beyond the regulations. This article is also about my concern that there is a real risk of returning to business as usual without institutionalizing the skills and value addition to human rights protection during emergencies affecting academia and healthcare, drawing from the Covid-19 pandemic experience.