Medidas Preventivas contra o Coronavírus

Mandatory COVID-19 vaccination and human rights

On Dec 9, 2021 the Austrian Government laid a bill before parliament that would impose a mandatory COVID-19 vaccination requirement for all its residents. This move followed the Greek Prime Minister’s announcement to impose fines on residents aged 60 years and older who do not take up COVID-19 vaccination. Many other nations are contemplating similar mandates or have adopted mandates in certain workplace settings, such as Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Indonesia, Italy, and the UK.  Some people resist vaccine mandates on pragmatic grounds, for example, that such mandates could decrease health-care staffing levels or morale. However, mandatory vaccination is also often opposed in principle. The UK Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, Sajid Javid, for instance, told the BBC on Dec 10, 2021 that he thought mandatory vaccination is “unethical”. Many others presume mandatory vaccination violates human rights. We believe that this view is mistaken, at least as a matter of international and comparative constitutional law.

Our opinion is based on extensive discussion and analysis held as part of the Lex-Atlas: Covid-19 (LAC19) project, a worldwide network of jurists that is producing and curating the open-access Oxford Compendium of National Legal Responses to Covid-19. 50 jurists in the network adopted principles concerning the legality and constitutionality of mandatory vaccination in October, 2021 (the LAC19 Principles). We concluded that mandatory vaccination and human rights law are compatible in principle and that there is a compelling rights-based case for a state duty to consider adopting mandatory vaccination, defined as any law that makes vaccination compulsory, or any public or private vaccination requirement for accessing a venue or service that cannot be avoided without undue burden. This definition recognises mandates adopted by public and private bodies and, crucially, that requirements avoidable through affordable testing are not mandatory.

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