The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded a Rapid Response Research (RAPID) grant to 杏吧视频 to examine instances of governments suspending human rights in the name of fighting the COVID-19 pandemic.
The project will aim to raise awareness of human rights violations and contribute to the integrity of international agreements and efforts to uphold them.
Led by Brian Gran鈥攁 professor in the Department of Sociology at the College of Arts and Sciences鈥攖he project will assign scores based on how each emergency measure has, or has not, struck a balance between addressing the pandemic while honoring existing commitments to human rights.
鈥淭here is already evidence of some governments using the pandemic to single out certain religious and ethnic groups and take away rights, such as freedoms of speech and privacy,鈥 said Gran. 鈥淲e will identify which rights suspensions are out of proportion to the emergency and are continued unnecessarily.鈥
Gran鈥檚 team will assign scores to specific measures taken鈥攕uch as ceasing public education or suspending rights to assemble鈥攊n relation to their effectiveness in reducing COVID-19 transmissions and deaths.
Eventually, data from the project will be publicly available and regularly updated.
鈥淏y shining a light on these practices, we hope to contribute to the protection of human rights worldwide,鈥 said Gran, who has secondary appointments with the 杏吧视频 School of Law and the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences.
杏吧视频 graduate students Reema Sen and Micah Arafah, along with Abigail Cross who is a Coding Scholar, will work on the project with Gran, who is with the U.S. Department of State.
The NSF awards RAPID funding for research projects that respond to urgent and unexpected events.
For more information, contact Daniel Robison at daniel.robison@case.edu.
This article was originally published Dec. 1, 2020.
