"Digital contact tracing for the Covid-19 epidemic: a business and human rights perspective," June 2020

On 11 March 2020, with over 294,000 cases worldwide, Covid-19 was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO).The world is facing a global health and socio-economic crisis with governments adopting unprecedented measures to deal with this emergency...

These activities have been supported by new technologies, such as geolocalisation apps, facial recognition and AI-based software for the enforcement of quarantine. Many of these actions have been enabled by emergency legislation and may have significant impacts on human rights and fundamental freedoms. These are data-intensive tools and, while the right to privacy is clearly being restricted, all human rights could potentially be affected. In order to limit governments’ abuses, these restrictions must respect the rule of law and fulfil the conditions set by human rights law. The WHO itself has acknowledged that human rights provide a crucial framework for ensuring the responses are effective and proportionate...

Restrictions and limitations can be placed on some human rights, including the right to privacy. Such ‘ordinary’ limitations are permitted if specific conditions are met. Emergency powers and derogation measures are allowed only where the ‘ordinary’ limitations are not sufficient to attain the stated objectives. States are thereby authorised to derogate from certain rights as long as specific conditions are satisfied...

This paper looks at three different technologies to support contact tracing and surveillance:

• an app based on a Quick Response (QR) code, adopted in China;

• an app based on geolocalisation, adopted in South Korea; and

• an app based on Bluetooth, adopted in Singapore and similar models currently considered in the European Union.