The Political Analysis of Selected EAC Member States’ Responses to COVID-19 and International Human Rights Standards: Learning from the Past

In the early 2020s, the world was grappling with the COVID-19 pandemic as one of the worst worldwide misfortunes of the 21st century. Governments around the world instituted a range of emergency rules in their territories in trying to contain the pandemic. In the East African Community (EAC), the pandemic was said to have accelerated the erosion of the democratic foundation on which protection of human rights eventually depends. The claim was that the pandemic had provided some EAC governments with an idyllic pretext to bring in disproportionate restraints on freedom of assembly, press freedom, and the capacity of human rights campaigners, opposition political parties, and civil society to operate. Stemming from desk research, this piece revisited relevant international treaties, institutional reports, speeches, media, and articles in connection with the various public health measures instituted by three selected EAC founding member states–Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda–to control the COVID-19 pandemic in relation to universally accepted standards of human rights. The analysis found incidents of using the pandemic as an excuse to inflict fears and crackdown on dissent, restrict people’s rights, and adopt emergency legislations which seemed to have long-lasting consequences beyond the health predicament in the selected states. The paradoxes in countering COVID-19 in these states revealed the difficulty in balancing health standards, legal requirements, and political interests in emerging democracies. As long as states can hardly be fair judges of their own deeds, the paper recommends investigation and prosecution by international legal institutions of those who violated basic human rights in the name of controlling the pandemic. Moreover, the paper reminds governments not to politicise future pandemics, which may inflict further pain on their citizens and violate their basic political rights standards.