Search

This paper highlights how the pandemic caused by COVID-19 constitutes one of the many global risks faced by our societies, one of those risks that have arrived to stay. That, therefore, demands a response out of a state of exceptionality. The paper also warns of the risks and insecurity for fundamental rights posed by the delay in the time of exceptional measures, and advocates regulation by organic law of health emergency situations --the current one or those that we may experience in the future--. The question of how we assess the risks and what responses we regulate in advance to face them constitutes today an imperative for the defense of fundamental rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The pandemic has brought with it innumerable conflicts and debates about fundamental rights and public freedoms and their limitation on the occasion of the protection of public health and the life and integrity of the community, a general interest enshrined in articles 15 and 43 of the Constitution. Among those, compulsory vaccination has been gaining a very relevant interest, especially since the arrival of the first vaccines against Covid-19. This paper addresses the debate on compulsory vaccination from a constitutional perspective, distinguishing between two concepts such as compulsory and forced vaccination. The individual rights involved in one and the other are very different. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The coronavirus pandemic has tested not only the legal foundations of fundamental rights in Austria, but also the awareness of them. A study by the Sigmund Freud University 2020 states that Austrians' unfamiliarity with their rights is due to their fragmented and stratified constitution and the lack of a catalog of fundamental rights. The dynamic and early work of the Constitutional Court during the Covid-19 crisis has helped to promote the interest of the citizenry, which has been affected in a whole range of freedoms, such as movement and residence, exercising a profession, assembly, the right to private and family life, property, data protection, education and equality. Although for reasons of space it is not appropriate in this paper to address the defense of each right, the reader will get an impression of the challenges, legal and procedural shortcomings of the Austrian legal framework in the face of interim measures to prevent the spread of the Covid-19 disease. In this context, the versatility and agility with which the centuries-old Constitution and its Constitutional Court have responded in defense of fundamental rights is positively surprising. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present pandemic has already become a veritable case study to assess the constitutional foundations of states of emergency and their application in practice. As Covid-19 spread to every corner of the planet, countries rushed to adopt harsh containment measures, often within the framework of one of the states of emergency provided for in their constitutional texts. In this context, this paper analyses the use of states of emergency in the Member States of the European Union from March 2020 to June 2021, focusing in particular on the role of national parliaments and domestic courts in preventing possible abuses of power by the executive in the management of the pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]