On March 5th, CESR led a skill-sharing session with members of EuroMed’s Economic and Social Rights Working Group, which explored ways to assess economic responses to COVID-19 through a human rights lens.
In the session, Allison Corkery and Mahinour El Badrawi shared some of CESR’s experiences of using indicators and benchmarks to measure government’s human rights obligations and introduced working group members to OPERA, which an analytical tool developed by CESR that examines these obligations through four dimensions: Outcomes, Policy Efforts, Resources, and Assessment. Examining these four dimensions helps uncover how budgets and other fiscal measures affect human rights. This makes it a useful tool for conducting a more systematic analysis of the human rights impacts of economic responses to COVID-19.
CESR and EuroMed Rights, a regional network of NGOs and civil society groups that promotes human rights and democracy on both sides of the Mediterranean Sea, will keep collaborating in the following months to dig deeper into the application of these tools in practice