Promise of human rights must be met with greater actions

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic struck, the world was confronted with the daunting tasks of combating poverty, reducing inequality and curbing discrimination, problems that are detrimental to the promotion of human rights worldwide.

With the cataclysmic pandemic continuing across the globe, the plight of the vulnerable is only being exacerbated. Human Rights Day, which falls on Thursday, is a timely reminder for the international community to meet the promise of protecting human rights with more substantial efforts.

The most immediate task to guarantee human rights is to beat the pandemic as fast as possible.

As the global coronavirus caseload is about to top 70 million in a matter of days, one fundamental truth the gravest global public health crisis in a century has underlined is that a failure to safeguard people's right to life will render the cause of human rights meaningless.

At such a critical juncture, any opportunistic idea to give up fighting and count on the myth of herd immunity is as inhuman as it is absurd.

Governments worldwide should shoulder their unshirkable responsibility and take comprehensive and rigorous prevention and control measures to safeguard the health of individual citizens, especially vulnerable groups including the elderly, people with disabilities, and minorities.

As noted by United Nations (UN) High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet on Wednesday, even to this day, "some political leaders are still playing down its (COVID-19's) impact, disparaging the use of simple measures such as wearing masks and avoiding large gatherings."

To put lives and health front and center, the international community should jointly denounce the reprehensible political manipulation that places politics ahead of human lives.

Vaccines still remain a strong shield against the coronavirus. The international community should boost cooperation in vaccine research, development and distribution and unwaveringly reject vaccine nationalism. They need to help ensure that safe and effective vaccines will be treated as a global public good and made available and affordable to all, particularly those in developing and the least developed countries.

The COVID-19 pandemic has also exposed the failure to ensure people's equal right to development in many parts of the world, particularly in developed countries like the United States.

According to a study by The New York Times, Latino and African-American residents in the United States have been "three times as likely to become infected as their white neighbors" and "nearly twice as likely to die from the virus as white people."

While the racial disparities are shocking, they are not surprising. The disproportionate toll of COVID-19 on those minority groups is resulting from generations of discrimination and systematically unequal access to job and education opportunities.

According to data from the Center for Economic Policy Research, a Washington-based think tank, while African-Americans account for about 12 percent of the U.S. population, they make up 26 percent of public transit workers, and nearly 20 percent of health care workers, thus making them more likely to work in jobs that can expose them to this highly infectious disease.

Still, it seems that politicians in Washington over the decades have neither the ability nor the appetite to solve those issues. What they are good at is to politicize the human rights issue out of self-interest.

Making real progress in the cause of human rights lies in concrete actions, not political showmanship.

As the largest developing country in the world with a population of 1.4 billion, China has always devoted itself to protecting people's right to development and safeguarding their right to health. China's successful campaigns to eradicate absolute poverty and contain the coronavirus show its commitment.

The coronavirus surge will somehow subside, yet the hard work to tackle the problems that are highlighted in this unprecedented crisis and are hurting human rights will be a long and demanding struggle.

As said by UN human rights chief Bachelet, a tragedy can be followed by an extraordinary opportunity to recover and become better. For the welfare of each and every member of the human race, the global community must not let this opportunity pass it by.