Trump could face international human rights law consequences for his coronavirus pandemic response

The US has long talked up human rights while ignoring its own obligations, but this president's flagrant disregard for people's lives during the Covid-19 outbreak could get him in hot water when it's all over

By Carli Pierson

   “Donald Trump has blood on his hands.” Those were the words of New York City’s comptroller Scott Stringer, whose mother died last week of Covid-19. He wasn’t the first person to say it, but this time Stringer’s words hung glaring, suspended in air thickened with the struggling breaths of tens of thousands of sick New Yorkers and exhausted medical workers struggling in emergency rooms and ICUs overflowing with dying patients. This time those words meant something to everyone in America, not just families of migrants worried about their loved ones stuck in filthy, overcrowded immigration detention centers.

Trump’s handling of the crisis has been monumentally bad; perhaps even criminally bad. From the disinformation campaigns (“it’s just a flu”), to deciding not to release immigration detainees with no criminal record at high risk for contracting the virus (including children), the president has made decisions that will likely have cost hundreds of thousands of Americans their lives.

The US is well-known in the international legal community for talking up human rights and international justice without wanting to commit itself to those principles. Under the Trump administration, the US withdrew from the UN Human Rights Council and the UN’s cultural and scientific body, UNESCO, in 2018 and 2019 respectively. Nevertheless, Trump’s actions toward detained migrants violate of several international human rights treaties to which the US is still a State Party. That includes the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, among others.