Born from the work of an international network of judges and scholars, coordinated by the University of Trento with financial support from the World Health Organization, the "Covid-19 Litigation Database" lands online.
The first place where litigation information on public health interventions taken in different countries around the world to counter COVID-19 is systematically collected or analyzed.
The project, in which universities and research centers from North and South America, Africa, Asia, and Australia are participating, aims to collect, select, organize, and publish, in an open-access online platform, case law related to litigation arising from governments' adoption of public health measures to counter the pandemic at the regional, national, or sub-national level.
In an era that has confronted governments with unprecedented challenges to protecting life and security and confronted them with the need to make choices, often tragic ones, balancing various fundamental rights and freedoms, the "COVID-19 Litigation Project" sheds light on the role of the courts in the context of global crises such as the current one. Indeed, courts are increasingly called upon to determine the legitimacy of public health measures to address COVID-19 and to balance health protection with other fundamental rights. In this context, the courts play an important gatekeeping role to ensure the rationality, reasonableness and proportionality of government interventions.
The creation of the Covid-19 Litigation Database aims to enable policymakers, lawyers (including but not limited to government lawyers), judges and other legal practitioners to learn from the experiences that have emerged in different jurisdictions. It can trigger different forms of inter-jurisdictional dialogue to coordinate responses to health crises.
In concurring to protect the most vulnerable and to ensure social solidarity through the balancing of rights, courts are now called upon to consider complex scientific and legal issues, albeit within a short time frame and with limited scientific evidence.
The selection of cases focuses on litigation concerning challenges to acts of states (and their sub-state articulations), including situations where administrations have failed to take public health action. Cases published in the database come from jurisdictions (WHO member states, including national and subnational legal systems) in all regions of the world, and, where applicable, from supranational courts, such as the European Court of Human Rights. The database includes essential references on selected cases, as well as an English-language summary of the principles of law applied by the courts.
Cases are identified through a purpose-built international network of judges and scholars, supported by public databases and extensive cross-media searches, as well as through the activation of a crowd sourcing tool, which allows for broader community involvement, whereby the project website will display a dedicated channel for case reports from database users.
The database will be continuously updated to reflect developments in the law in each jurisdiction. An interactive search is made available so that users can also provide suggestions for the integration of the database, its use and usefulness.
