| Justice in Global Health Emergencies & Humanitarian Crises

We’re taking a brief break in August! Please see the post for resources to keep you busy until then.

Ayesha Ahmad, drawing on her experience as an expert witness in asylum seeker cases, discusses the conflict between the trauma that asylum seekers embody, live, and express and the way that such stories are received by the paradigms of psychiatry and law.

In Episode 11 of ‘Just Emergencies’, Meena Krishnamurthy talks about the ongoing anti-racist protests around the world, whether there’s an obligation to participate in them – especially during a worldwide pandemic-, and how they differ politically and philosophically from the anti-Covid-19 protests that have also sprung up.

Emma Nance, postgraduate student on the LLM in Medical Law and Ethics at Edinburgh University School of Law, shares her thoughts and personal experience of racism in the context of Covid-19.

In Episode 10 of Just Emergenices, Dr Verina Wild and Professor Paula-Irene Villa Braslavsky discuss the relationship between ‘Vulnerability, Gender, and Care’ in the context of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic and through a sociological lens.

The possibility of using immunity certifications as a new way of monitoring and managing the spread of Covid-19 has recently garnered a lot of attention. Agomoni Ganguli-Mitra recently spoke at Nuffield’s ‘Ethical implications of antibody testing and “immunity certification”’ webinar about how such policies might exacerbate existing inequalities. Find out more and watch the webinar (link included) here.

In her piece for the BMJ, Agomoni Ganguli-Mitra argues that the concept of vulnerability needs to be unpacked in the context of the Covid-19 outbreak. Applying a taxonomy of vulnerability, she discusses how different groups become and are made vulnerable during this worldwide pandemic.

In her second post on our website, Radha Adhikari discusses the inequities that the BAME health workforce faces in the Covid-19 outbreak and contextualises this within the historical and ongoing disadvantages this group experiences in the UK.

In our fourth animation, Agomoni Ganguli-Mitra discusses the terms ’emergency’, ‘disasters’, and ‘crisis’, their usage, and their ethical implications.

Peter West-Oram discusses how the UK government has failed to act in solidarity with its citizens during the Covid-19 outbreak.