In emergency situations, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, a state has the right and duty under both international and domestic constitutional law to take appropriate steps to protect the health and security of its population. Emergency regimes may allow for the suspension or limitation of normal constitutional government and even human rights. Those measures are not, however, a license for authoritarian rule, but they must conform to legal standards of necessity, reasonableness, and proportionality that limit state action in ways appropriate to the maintenance of the rule of law in the context of a public health emergency. The effects resorting to emergency powers has had on the normal operations of constitutional government, and the ways in which normal constitutional government can be restored, are issues of general concern to all constitutional democracies. weiterlesen