we wouldn't go in. the court system or bring down the law. and successful beyond belief. that not only would this is the way we're doing. not we would start aug 7th on d w. censorship rules it literally is apathetic of the kind you have called coronavirus the new terrorism nobody wants to see a dictatorship go to over or over their heads. conflict zone it is on summer break and we look back at this season's most controversial interviews in april we decided to take the opportunity to focus on the impact of the coronavirus pandemic is having on human rights amid reports around the world of advance of surveillance

authoritarian power grabs and society's most vulnerable facing hunger i spoke with the head of human rights watch kenneth roth with the u.n. warning the public health emergency is quickly becoming a human rights crisis how many limitations are people willing to accept to fight a threat like coronavirus. kenneth roth welcome to conflict zone thanks for having me. there are very immediate needs amid this coronavirus pandemic hundreds of thousands have already died a qana means have been hit hard many people are losing their jobs some are even trying to figure out how to put food on the table in these extraordinary times how do you put human rights at the top of the agenda. well i think it's important sara to note

that human rights allow certain extraordinary governmental powers in time of a genuine public emergency or crisis like we're facing so you know nobody objects from a human rights perspective to the efforts to limit our trouble to inforce social distancing to do the things that are necessary and proportionate to our public health needs but when autocrats say oh we need to does violate your human rights left and right in order to protect you that's a very dangerous message it's wrong not only as a matter of principle but it actually undermines our public health and that's something that human rights watch has been finding over and over that you know when autocrats censor or or grab power or take various other steps that are antithetical to human rights it actually puts us in a worse place in public health terms you mentioned autocrats there and i'd like to bring you to what the un special rapporteur on counterterrorism and human rights said she said the following we could have

a parallel epidemic of authoritarian and repressive measures following close if not on the heels of this health epidemic how big is the threat. i think the threat is absolutely real i mean i think back to the terrorist attacks of september 11th 2001 you know there are many parallels to that time and today in each case there was a genuine threat to public safety people called on their governments to protect them and what we saw then is you know many governments overreach in the name of protection they completely undermine human rights in ways that didn't make us any safer so you know it was hard then to roll back some of those stats you know today if you look at the united states we still have one ton of the bush cia torturers were never prosecuted you know we still have large portions of the surveillance state that the national security agency created we still have killing by targeted you know by drones targeted killing by them so you know these are the kinds of threats that we could face today but the flipside is that frankly this is also an

opportunity to show that respect for human rights is essential to an effective public health strategy and i mean let me give an example going to the origins of this pandemic if we look at what the chinese government did in harlem at the outbreak of the epidemic. they censored rather than heated they handful of doctors who tried to sound the alarm they said look at you know we don't know what's happening but there is a new leaf full strata there they call that a sars like corona virus and what the chinese authorities did is you know rather than listen to them rather than. they suppress them because this is the kind of bad news that beijing doesn't like to hear there was a read and study by the university of southampton that you know if those 3 weeks of not being wasted it was 3 weeks during which literally millions of people traveled through was left who with the virus really went global if not for those wasted 3 weeks by the end of february the prevalence of the virus would have been 95 percent

less than it was so it actually shows you that censorship kills it literally is apathetic of the public health and i want to get to more of that censorship and especially the chinese handling of the crisis but i want to continue 1st with the authoritarian parent power grab that you mentioned for example in hungary and ask you because hungary secretary of international communication actually attacked you zoltan kovacs saying the following while the director of human rights watch gazes at his navel in geneva fretting about authoritarian rot the hungry and people look for a steady hand at the writer to navigate this storm doesn't he have a point. i mean contrary i mean that you know that's just the rhetoric he gives and what viktor orban the prime minister of hungary is done is used this coronavirus to create the european union's 1st dictatorship i'm he is the power now to go by decree to sideline parliament and there is no need for another election ever until

parliament approves that and his party controls parliament this is a dictatorship pure and simple and so you know let's look how that dictatorship is doing i'm a human rights watch has been in the process of studying how gerry and hospitals and what we found is that while orbán takes the very generous stabilisation funds provided by the european union and uses them to build football stadiums to pay off his cronies i mean quite literally. the hospitals are disaster people need to bring their own toilet paper people are being it was thrown out on the street because they're not currently the coronavirus patient they are you know this illustrates what happens when you have an unaccountable government and that's what the door about is so if you're ok and. if you're right can where is the domestic outcry because the public overwhelmingly supports these emergency measures. well you know what emergency measures another thing over the public overwhelmingly supports social distancing restrictions on travel i mean every democracy in the world is doing that of course that's appropriate what they don't support is power grabs and

censorship and self-serving stops of the sort of there or about it on the most recent indication we have is when there were you know municipal they oral elections recently or bounce party last budapest in the leading 15 cities so it's not as if the hunger in public is happy with this but orbán has been you know censoring the media undermining the possibility of the courts to check him so you know when the public is able to speak out it expresses its disapproval but nobody wants to see a dictatorship go to over over their head when that dictatorship as it always does serves the political interests of the sudan or so on what is your strategy to help promote human rights in countries like hungry when the majority of the population supports these measures how do you just you know again i mean i think i have to differ with you that the majority of the population doesn't support a dictatorship you know the population supports the uncontroversial things social distancing struggle restrictions of course but a dictatorship no and so what we have been trying to do for example with the

european union is to ask you know why does the european union continue to provide extraordinarily generous subsidies to this trojan horse within european democracy you know why for example is the european people's party the center right alliance in the european parliament why does it continue to treat. or bounce party is a member or rather than a formally expelled it suspended it but it didn't expel it you know why is the european union's budget to you to provide so these are the kinds of things that can be done but frankly so far european political leaders have been quite timid they issued a so-called protest when or by a stablished that's dictatorship but they didn't name hungary it was just a being a blanching eric statement of principle it was so bland that orbán joined it was you say it's a question of. accountability it's a question of pressuring hungry i want to get to that a little bit later but 1st i want to turn to surveillance now. that is another measure that we have seen emerged amid this coronavirus crisis you have called

corona virus the new terrorism through that lens where is the balance between surveillance and civil liberties right now. well i think what's interesting is what we've seen over the last few weeks as the debate on this topic has evolved is that there's growing recognition that respect for privacy is actually essential for this surveillance to work and let me explain the leading option right now to be pursued is an app that would be downloaded onto your phone and would use basically a bluetooth technology to see who has been in contact with whom if there are if somebody is infected and so you would download the app you turn on your bluetooth capacity and if you later are found to have been infected your phone will have collected any other bluetooth accessible phone that you were near during the prior to weeks and those people would be notified that they might have been infected and they need to take protective measures so it's a good idea in principle but you have to start looking at the fine print you know

we all know the name of the infected person be disclosed there's really no need for that you know will the location of this this meeting be recorded or not again there's no need for that all you need to know is that you when you're someone who's affected you don't need to know the house or store or whatever where that occurred you know is going to be stored just for 2 weeks when it's actionable or is going to be stored forever it is it can be given to the police or not and what we found is that for people to be willing to download these apps all those kind of questions have to be answered in a way that respects but a lot of those a lot of those questions haven't been answered yet can and you know if we just look at the public opinion it seems to be in many countries around the world in support of these surveillance measures you know i look at south korea where 77 percent of south koreans supported a proposal to require all people subject to a 2 week self isolation to wear electronic responds and it's not just there also 65 percent of britons support government use of mobile phone data so the question is i

mean the public clearly sees the merits of it but let's bring it back to the privacy how high is the risk that people are too open to give up their privacy because they're afraid they're afraid of this virus. i think what we're seeing is that as people become aware of the options for privacy so yes they want electronic surveillance to facilitate context tracing but for example the debate is completely moved away the nature of abuse privacy over their own health no no what other is the point is that respect for privacy is the best way to protect people's health because that's how you get the cooperation with public health initiatives that's required so for example you mentioned south korea south korea used location data which is incredibly intrusive you know if you basically will reveal to the public every place you went in the course of the day you're really really revealing huge parts about your private life and if you saw that you know south korea would publicize you so once i was in this location and you know secretly exams would be

revealed and like it was actually quite horrible the debate is now completely moved away from location data the reason we're talking about this bluetooth technology is because the public so checks the use of location data. so privacy is one issue but we also have around the world people struggling to get just the basics fleeing their homes perhaps because of violence persecution hunger we have the situation for refugees around the world and the united nations says the following the core principles of refugee protection are being put to a test and it states the following statistics that 167 countries have so far fully or partially closed their borders continue to contain the spread of the virus and at least 57 states are making no exception for people seeking asylum in your view how can states manage border restrictions right now in ways that also respect international human rights and refugee protection standards including through these

quarantines and health checks that we have seen that have become so popular. i mean what you're pointing out is an absolute problem and there are many governments that are closing their borders to virtually anybody including people seeking asylum including people who have a right to seek refuge because they're fleeing violence or persecution and that is a problem we're seeing around the world there are alternatives that would respect both the right to asylum and the right to public health and that would be for example you know testing people if they come across the border simple as that and if they test positive parenting them for a period of time but you know the way trump is doing is just sending everybody off to mexico regardless is not respecting any right to asylum it's a blatant violation of international refugee law. the world's poorest also poised to be disproportionately affected we have here from the world food program saying that the cove in 1000 pandemic will see more than a quarter of

a 1000000000 people suffering acute hunger by the end of the year where's the action but i think that you know this is the problem not simply in poor countries which is what the world food programme is highlighting but it's also a problem you know closer to home every country has its neglected marginalized disadvantaged communities you know whether it's its immigrants or you know people getting in poverty and there is a tendency on the part of governments to just oh you know ignore those people you know if people can't afford the very basics they're not going to be able to afford a vaccine that is very clear and therefore i'd like to ask you because there are calls for any coronavirus vaccine to be accessible for all we have the u.n. secretary general antonio ted as saying that the treatments and vaccines should actually belong to the whole world not individual countries or regions when we look at the state of leadership that you highlighted in your last answer there how should that be organized. well you know ideally this is something that the world health organization would supervise i mean trump is in the process of attacking the

w.h.o. was a way of diverting attention from his own mismanagement of the crisis but you know if you look at for example what happens with say it's a polio war you know other infectious diseases where there is a global effort to to you know provide vaccination to everyone we're going to need something like that for the crown a virus once a vaccine is available and it's a matter again of self-interest because you know we may well paxson a people in parts of the world but if their whole area is where the the coronavirus flourishes it's going to remain a threat because even in the west can bassinet everyone how realistic are multilateral approach is the can i mean if you're if you're just a realist on this because we have a u.s. president who is not a strong supporter of multilateral approaches or human rights efforts for that matter i'm looking at him you know quitting the u.n. human rights council the united states also a history of the band doing multilateral commitments you mentioned pledges to defund the w.h.o. also the paris.