COVID-19 & Human Rights: Vulnerabilities & Inequality

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to evolve, social and economic inequalities have contributed to its complexity. This event will bring together an international group of experts to discuss what governments and policymakers can do to address the vulnerabilities of the most marginalised groups. The speakers will address how the world can better prepare for the next pandemic. Acknowledging that pandemic fatigue has started to kick in, the group will also discuss the window of opportunity to implement fundamental reforms toward reducing inequalities.

Event moderators, Martha Davis, Morten Kjaerum and Amanda Lyons, will draw on their contributions to the new book, COVID-19 and Human Rights.

Panelists:

Gerard Quinn

Gerard Quinn is the UN Special Rapporteur on the rights of persons with disabilities. He was the founding director of the Centre for Disability Law and Policy at the National University of Ireland and now holds the Wallenberg Chair at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute and a research chair at the University of Leeds. A graduate of Harvard Law School, he holds three lifetime awards for his international disability law work, and he was a drafted of the UN disability convention.

Elina Castillo Jiménez

Elina Castillo Jiménez is a feminist human rights lawyer who works at the intersection of human rights, race, gender, migration and public policy. She holds law degrees from the Dominican Republic and the University of Nottingham, where she studied as a Chevening Scholar, and was a Visiting Scholar at the University of Minnesota Human Rights Center. As part of her multisector experience, she has worked for governments and international advocacy groups, such as Oxfam and Amnesty International.

Janine Moussa

Janine Moussa is a human rights lawyer with almost two decades of experience in women’s human rights.

Among her many accomplishments, she co-founded the Due Diligence Project on State obligation to end violence against women, and served as Senior Program Specialist on violence against women with the UN Division for the Advancement of Women (now UN Women). She is an adjunct professor at George Washington School of Law in Washington, D.C.

Hope Metcalf

Hope Metcalf is Executive Director of the Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Rights Law at Yale Law School, where she co-teaches a human rights clinic. She has represented people who have been arbitrarily detained and tortured in the context of U.S. counterterrorism operations as well as U.S. domestic prisons. Her teaching, research and writing focus on the rights of people in various forms of detention, and she consults with organizations around the world on those subjects.