Right to life must be paramount, expert says of lockdown legal challenges

The right to life must be paramount, an expert has argued, in the wake of several legal challenges against Covid-19 lockdown regulations.

Various institutions have supported the call for the de-escalation of the lockdown to level 1, a view which concerned Safura Abdool Karim, senior researcher at the Wits University School of Public Health.

South Africa would be better served if a recent high court judgment declaring the current lockdown regulations unconstitutional was appealed, said Abdool Karim.

This was not because she didn’t believe that some regulations had to undergo constitutional scrutiny, but because the judgment did not deal with rationality of each regulation.

Abdool Karim was also concerned with the overemphasis of constitutional rights over those which were most fundamental, especially that of the right to life. It was important to keep this in mind when challenging the constitutionality of the lockdown regulations, which were primarily about preserving human life.

“It is the most fundamental right we have and no one really looks at it from this point of view,” she said. “Before you start talking about the freedom of movement, dignity and the right to smoke tobacco, I think it’s very important to remember that.

“The reality is that if you allow me to walk around and do what I want, my conduct may end up killing someone else and that is an important concern to raise.

“At the moment, there are five cases pending challenging the constitutionality of different parts of the lockdown regulations.

“What one would normally expect is that people should consolidate all of this into one court challenge but, again, part of this is that we are going into uncharted territory and we need to make decisions quickly, and don’t necessarily have the legal framework and the mechanisms to do that.”

Analytics company Pandata recently published an open letter to President Cyril Ramaphosa calling for the urgent enactment of level 1 lockdown restrictions in order to address the growing number of South Africans suffering from hunger.

According to Pandata coordinator Nick Hudson, the company’s estimates of the long-term economic damage and loss of life that SA could still endure made it increasingly clear that a more rapid de-escalation of the Covid-19 lockdown was required to save the economy, livelihoods and, ultimately, lives.

Abdool Karim said the models used by Pandata and many of its peers severely underestimated peak fatality rates and in the case of SA, many unique factors had not been considered.

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