Guy Baldwin (University of Manchester), Positive Obligations to Protect the Population under Human Rights Law, Judicial Review, vol. 30, no. 3 (2025) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Societies face myriad threats to the safety and wellbeing of their populations, ranging from pandemics to climate change. Increasingly, courts evaluate these issues through the prism of human rights law. However, the outcomes of such judicial decisions have varied: sometimes courts have taken issue with measures intended to protect the population on human rights grounds, as in certain decisions relating to the coronavirus pandemic that restricted individual rights, while at other times courts have found that acting to address a threat to the population is legally necessary, as in decisions relating to the need to respond to climate change. This raises some important questions, including: what are the obligations of the state to protect the public? And to what extent do these obligations allow for proactive and preventive action by states, even if this entails interference with individual rights?
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