Moulding the Right to Health in the Time of the Pandemic

Abstract

The coronavirus pandemic has overturned the traditional terms of ‘normality’ in the daily lives of citizens around the world. After an inexplicable period of provocative inaction against repeated calls by the World Health Organisation (WHO), States were called to take drastic and unprecedented measures that resulted in suspending the most important fundamental rights, especially of individual and social nature. Cyprus could not, of course, be an exception to the imposition of protective and precautionary measures, having transformed from a purely social State into a social State of preven- tion. In the overall response to the pandemic, the report is positive. In the emerging le- gal environment, the anxious effort of the State mechanism to protect human life at all costs makes the principle of practical harmonisation of conflicting fundamental rights virtually inapplicable. In this environment, the citizen seems powerless and possibly vulnerable to the will of the executive power. The advent of the pandemic and the con- stant endangerment of human existence urge the national legislator to abandon the logic of harmonisation of fundamental rights and focus on their prioritisation.