Dear readers,

We are living in a state of multiple crises: an obvious but still neglected climate crisis; a health crisis with an ongoing pandemic; an economic and financial crisis closely related to an energy crisis; and a human security crisis reflected in the many violent conflicts, new and long-lasting, around the globe. Responses to crises are often emotional, populist and fear-induced. In order to maintain and solidify their power and pursue their interests, governments tend to use crises to create a permanent state of exception, legitimating measures that under ‘normal’ circumstances might have been unthinkable. On the other hand, crises unsettle people – people lose trust in political systems, the media or the rule of law in general. Human rights and violations thereof are at the core of these dynamics; ultimately, crises are a symptom of the fragility of the human rights system, and the disregard by states of rights commonly agreed upon by the international community. At the same time, the doubts about institutions, democratic systems and the rule of law are also an expression of a lack of trust in human rights. What we need, thus, is to regain control over the human rights discourse, in order to be able to respond profoundly to the violation of human rights, and to re-establish trust in them, and the system established to implement them, by showing that human rights are more than just written words. As a platform for the discussion of important and topical human rights issues, the European Yearbook on Human Rights 2022 aims to make a contribution towards ensuring that future responses to crises not only pay respect to human rights but are rooted in them. Differently from the previous editions, which were dedicated to specific topics (the 2021 edition was dedicated to ‘Human Rights in Times of a Pandemic’ , and the 2020 edition to the rights of the child), the EYHR 2022 takes a broad approach to various topical human rights issues in Europe and beyond.

Dear readers,

When COVID-19 hit the world, policy-makers and governments introduced a wide range of measures in the name of the pandemic. Their necessity might have been easily argued from a public health perspective justifying restrictions on some rights, such as those resulting from the imposition of quarantine or isolation limiting the freedom of movement and/or freedom of assembly. Additionally, as it was an unprecedented crisis, states authorities had to deploy maximum resources to combat the spread of the disease and had to take decisions at speed, which, while being well intended, might inadvertently have had a negative human rights impact. As the pandemic has now been going on for over a year in which the knowledge about the disease has considerably increased and vaccines have turned out to be an effective means to combat it, now seems to be the right moment to reflect on the impacts COVID-19 had on human rights and to assess the proportionality and necessity of state responses to the pandemic in light of human rights. COVID-19 measures disproportionally impacted certain groups of people, marginalised communities and certain individuals in society, exacerbating existing shortcoming in the protection of human rights and raising profound challenges with respect to non-discrimination laws, prevailing structural inequalities and the fragility of the rule of law. In order to ensure a resilient human rights system, there is a need to assess all these issues in order to ensure that in the future, responses to crisis not only pay respect to human rights but are rooted in them.

The European Yearbook on Human Rights has always been a platform for young and renowned scholars to raise, address and discuss important and topical human rights issues. It does not come as a big surprise, thus, that the 2021 EYHR is a special edition dedicated to ‘Human Rights in Times of a Pandemic’. When selecting the final contributions, we, the editorial team, endeavored to cover a wide variety of topics, and we are proud to provide our readers with such a rich and intensive corpus of materials which clearly draws attention to important human rights aspects of the pandemic and contributes to the wider debate on state discretion in times of emergencies.