On June the 2nd, CESR continued its work with EuroMed Rights’ Economic and Social Rights Working Group, holding a skills-sharing session on evaluating how governments’ fiscal responses to COVID-19 impact people’s human rights. The session was a follow-up to one held in March. It consolidated and built on what we covered in the first, while also being instructive for a number of additional working group members who weren’t able to attend it.
Continuing the focus on measuring the impact of fiscal policy in the context of COVID-19, the session recapped how to frame fiscal policy as a human rights issue, by using indicators with ‘OPERA’, a framework that organizes relevant human rights standards and principles into four dimensions: Outcomes, Policy Efforts, Resources and Assessment. Led by CESR’s Mahinour El Badrawi and Allison Corkery, the session also introduced some of the practicalities of collecting, analyzing and presenting data. To illustrate the value of these tools in addressing rights in the context of economic crisis, it shared a case study of work we did in Spain, in 2012, which drew on OPERA to analyze data to make the case that austerity violated rights.
The session was also a chance to learn what work the group’s members are doing related to the economic impact of COVID-19 and explore what ways the working group could be supporting its members in this work. Building on that discussion, CESR and EuroMed Rights will keep collaborating to strengthen the human rights analysis of responses to COVID.
