Introduction: Special issue on ‘The Covid-19 Pandemic, Inequalities and Human Rights in South Africa’, part 1

Abstract

When the Covid-19 pandemic exploded in early 2020, much was unknown about the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2, or SARS-CoV-2, its pathways of transmission and treatment, how to contain it, and its effects. South Africa was praised for its decisive early action in declaring a state of disaster and instituting a national lockdown to flatten its infection curve, avoid deaths and a devastating burden on its health system, and buy time to contain the pandemic. From the outset, it was clear that the trade-off between public health and the economy was to have profound and deeply racialised, gendered and class-based consequences. Within a couple of months of lockdown, South Africa witnessed deepening hunger and food insecurity, loss of income and livelihoods, decreased access to education, increased violence at the hands of security forces, and illness and death. Women bore particular burdens of vulnerability, poverty, care for dependents, and heightened susceptibility to domestic violence. Across the country, Covid-19 tracked well-worn pathways of racialised, gendered and classbased inequality and poverty. In May 2020, the South African Journal on Human Rights (SAJHR), in partnership with the NRF South African Research Chair in Equality, Law and Social Justice, issued a call for papers for a conference and special issue on ‘The Covid-19 Pandemic, Inequalities and Human Rights in South Africa’. We were overwhelmed by the response and are pleased to publish this first part of a two-part special issue in which emergent and established academics analyse and reflect upon Covid-19 and its multiple effects from a range of legal, socio-legal, constitutional and human rights perspectives. This is an introduction to the first of two parts of the special issue. Covid-19’s devastating effect on our economy and society was immediate, deep and visible, with particularly severe effects on multiple, intersectional, historically disadvantaged groups, including black persons, women (particularly women-headed households), young people, learners and students in low-income households, residents of rural areas, workers in the informal sector, migrants and asylum-seekers, and persons