PHM-Exch> Responses to the Coronavirus must defend, build int’l solidarity for people’s rights

[Richa Chintan]

*From: *Viva Salud - Wim De Ceukelaire <wim at vivasalud.be>

*Responses to the Coronavirus must defend, build int’l solidarity for
people’s rights*

With the 2019 coronavirus disease (COVID-19) considered a pandemic, some
governments, such as Italy, Spain, Iran and the Philippines, have already
responded with lockdown and quarantine measures. IBON International asserts
that governments are duty-bound to respond to communities’ immediate needs,
and must not use the health emergency as a pretext for repressive measures
that threaten civil-political rights and bolster authoritarian trends. In
the long run, structural changes are needed to protect the people during
health crises.

Today’s health emergency is a time for international cooperation.  We must
stand in solidarity with peoples whose communities are afflicted by the
coronavirus disease. It is even more important today to stand with people’s
organisations demanding the realisation of rights to create conditions for
healthy communities and long-term sustainable development.

Immediately, governments in affected countries must provide for basic
supplies for hygiene and building immune resistance. Resources must be
channelled for mass testing facilities as a primary way of curtailing the
contagion. The right to social services must be guaranteed, such as water
supply and health services for prevention, monitoring and treatment of the
disease. Working sectors must be guaranteed basic rights to secure
employment, living wages and benefits, and safe workplaces. Frontline
health workers, who bear the burden in a health crisis, must be supported.
Effective public information should reach the most in need.

Today’s COVID-19 pandemic reveals the structural barriers to the people’s
right to health and to other basic rights, after decades of neoliberal
policy working for corporate giants in the monopoly capitalist system.
Costly health services are a major barrier today after decades of
privatisation, with official estimates showing that around 210 million
people spend more than 25% of their annual incomes on health care, as
workers see lower income shares while corporate profits rise.

The people’s right to health cannot be separated from other socio-economic
rights. Workers must have the collective capacity to assert their rights
today, from sick leaves to benefits. But after decades of “flexible
labour,” workers are seeing impediments to their right to join or create a
union in 107 countries by 2019, as they face different forms of harassment
and even killings. Before working people could self-quarantine or practice
social distancing, they need affordable, decent and mass housing and
transportation systems. But these systems are not present in many parts of
the global South, and around 1.8 billion people live in “abhorrent housing
conditions and homelessness.”

Without food sovereignty and the right to food, people have nutrition gaps
and increased vulnerabilities to illnesses. But after decades of trade and
investment liberalisation that burdened small farmers in the global South,
more than 820 million people are undernourished, and another 124 million
live in “crisis levels of acute food insecurity”—affecting women more than
men. This is as 45 to 200 million hectares of land have been plundered from
small farmers in the last decade, largely in low income countries.

Subpar responses to the pandemic of a number of governments show precisely
why long-term and genuine development, led and for the people, is
essential. A way to cushion the impacts of future epidemics and prevent
mass contagion is to ensure that people have the material basis to take
care of their health and sustain their needs.

Budget cuts in healthcare worsen the situation in Southern countries.
Conditions of debt dependence, corporate tax evasion, and regressive tax
regimes that encouraged austerity and drains on public coffers, while
placing the burden on the people, must be reversed. It is high time for
development cooperation to improve in both quality and quantity—for aid to
really be based on historical responsibility and communities’ demands
instead of donor interests. South-South Cooperation would be valuable for
humanitarian needs, along with mutual cooperation in sharing effective
strategies to curb the spread of infection.

The international community and peoples around the world must also be
watchful for governments that might abuse the situation to further
authoritarian rule and the interest of power-hungry cliques and business.
Militaristic solutions to a health crisis only divert resources otherwise
productively used on immediate needs and long-term development.

Already, business interests and policymakers are fearful of the effects of
the COVID-19 on markets, amid travel suspensions, community and border
lockdowns, and slower economic activity. The world must be alert that
responses focus on public needs primarily, and not be instrumentalised for
big business purposes. World Bank officials’ claims that developing
countries must work for “supporting the private sector” through tax cuts
and subsidies must always be counterposed with realities that public
spending on health and other social services must be the priority to solve
the health emergency. We must also maintain that public needs—from
emergency measures, and later on, vaccine patents—should not be captured by
private business interests.

Peoples and the international community must ensure that immediate and
long-term policy responses do not worsen the already dire state of working
people’s rights and their access to basic social services. States which are
not guaranteeing these basic socio-economic rights must be held accountable
by their citizens and the international community.

It is of utmost urgency for the international community to dismantle the
decades of neoliberal policy that removed guarantees on people’s rights and
resulted to precarious economic situations. It is time to listen to peoples
and their organisations asserting their right to health and development. #


https://iboninternational.org/2020/03/14/responses-to-the-coronavirus-must-defend-build-intl-solidarity-for-peoples-rights/
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