COVID-19-Related Sanitary Crisis and Derogations under Article 15 of the Convention: Considerations in Estonia

Abstract

"1 Introduction By the time I am writing this article, it is already a fact that a highly contagious coronavirus disease COVID-19 has spread – and is still spreading – all over the world and its case rate has reached enormous proportions. All states still have to tackle different aspects of the crisis, lacking authorized medicine for treatment or vaccinations against COVID-19, fearing, at the same time, that the situation could worsen again when the autumn comes. But already on 11 March 2020, when the World Health Organization (WHO) assessed that an outbreak of COVID-19, which was first identified in December 2019 in Wuhan, China, had reached such a global spread that it could be characterized as a pandemic, it was obvious that no State will remain untouched. Therefore, the WHO repeated its call to governments to take urgent and aggressive action to stop the spread of the virus.1 At that time, the WHO considered Europe the active centre of the pandemic with more reported cases and deaths than the rest of the world combined, apart from China.2 European states, in turn, rapidly started to take extraordinary steps to fight the spread of that disease. Relying on the WHO’s latest assessment and the increasing number of infected persons in Estonia, late in the evening of 12 March 2020, the Government of Estonia also declared an emergency situation in the administrative territory of Estonia.3 Estonia was one of the states that also decided to inform the Secretary General of the Council of Europe of the health-related emergency situation in Estonia and noted, with reference to Article 15 of the European Convention on Human Rights (‘the Convention’), that some emergency measures adopted temporarily may involve a derogation from certain obligations under the Convention.4 As the question ‘derogate or not’ was heatedly debated in spring 2020, I was asked to shed light on the reasons why Estonia decided to submit a declaration related to Article 15 of the Convention. Submitting that declaration was dependent on the domestic declaration of the emergency situation in Estonia and on the measures that were taken during the emergency situation. Therefore, first the domestic legal system in special situations, the reason and purpose of the COVID-19-related emergency situation and specific measures taken during the latter should be briefly discussed."