South Asia Citizens Web

It has been agreed by experts that large scale transmission in the case of the coronavirus epidemic is inevitable. Complete lockdown can only give us time to prepare for this inevitable eventuality and can also give us some control over the manner in which it spreads geographically. However, the lockdown has come at a huge cost for 93% of our workers and their families who are in the unorganised sector and have neither permanent jobs, nor savings and a social security net to protect them. The conflict now is between livelihoods of the poor, the loss of which is leading to death and suffering by hunger or the loss of lives taken by the coronavirus. Lock down was the time for preparation by Governments and the public health system, and should have been used for data collection on the spread of the disease, surveillance by household visits and preparation of quarantine and treatment facilities. There are conflicting views about how much of this has happened in our state and in the country in general, due to the non-transparency of our Governments. However, there is no doubt that the mass of people in our state can no longer accept blanket lockdown.

HRCP has released its annual flagship report on the state of human rights in Pakistan in 2019. The report looks at the human rights record in Punjab, Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Balochistan, Islamabad, AJK and Gilgit-Baltistan.

We, a group of activists and citizens of India, express our deep concern over the recent arrests on the false pretext that have been taking place using the regressive Section 124A of the Indian Penal Code and Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) by the Union government. When governments all over the world are fighting against the COVID-19 pandemic and trying to obliterate the Coronavirus, Modi government using the opportunity created by the lockdown is fighting dissidents and abolishing them of their fundamental rights. People are being picked up and put in jails under fictitious cases.

Even as the country is reeling under the impacts of the lockdown and coping with a pandemic, the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change (MoEFCC) has made a time-bound call for comments on the draft Environmental Impact Assessment Notification (EIA) 2020, published on its website on 12th March, 2020. The National Alliance of People’s Movements condemns this ill-timed move aimed at complete dilution of existing provisions that are meant to protect the interests of the environment and project affected people.

The undersigned represent scientists and researchers from across the globe. The current COVID-19 crisis is unprecedented and we need innovative ways of coming out of the current lockdowns. However, we are concerned that some “solutions” to the crisis may, via mission creep, result in systems which would allow unprecedented surveillance of society at large.