FES BRIEFING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC AND FUNDAMENTAL RIGHTS IN CYPRUS Corina Demetriou Nicos Trimikliniotis July 2022 The pandemic brought the celebrated‘world on the move’ to a standstill. The fear and panic generated new global and lo­calized states of hygienic emergency against‘miasmic devi­ants’ and unleashed logics of control, containment and exclu­sion that undermine the culture of collective and individual rights. As the various waves of the pandemic unfold with the mutations of the virus, we witness accentuated processes of exclusion, racialization, marginalization and expulsion of those deemed different,‘deviant’,‘dangerous’ and‘uncon­trollable’, not only in Cyprus but in different parts of the globe. Both new borders and bordering processes are generated, and old ones are re-enacted and invigorated. This environ­ment is engendering both‘old’ and‘new’ forces in Europe and around the globe, bringing about the collapse of consen­sus in politics and generating a‘politics of hate’, as well as invigorated forms of solidarity and resistance, by enacting new socialities of significant segments of the populations. The pandemic revealed executive and administrative excesses and gaps in democratic accountability which the government sought to justify on the basis of the emergency. The legality of the measures adopted was constantly being reshaped and shrunk, revealing the significance of the legitimacy that only popular endorsement can provide. The closure of the check­points as a first measure before any other measure adopted generated a climate of mistrust against the government, which subsequently escalated into a generalized opposition to several measures. The climate of mistrust was further ag­gravated by news of profiteering from government contracts for importing medical supplies and the fact that the recom­mendations of the scientific committee were not always re­flected in the measures actually introduced, with regular and unjustified exemptions granted to the church and private businesses. When the vaccines appeared, the general climate of mistrust translated itself into a suspicion against the vac­cines. The‘discounted’ holidays in hotels across Cyprus for the vaccinated, for instance, is unlikely to have served as an incentive for anyone to get vaccinated and emerges more like a measure to finance the hotel industry rather than promote vaccination. The police were given unprecedented powers and discretion, perpetrating a culture of arbitrariness within the police corps that eventually became hard to contain. EU institutions have already concluded that this is an area where particular atten­tion needs to be paid, but more so in the case of Cyprus be­cause of the legal gap in explicitly prohibiting racial profiling. This gap and the failure to introduce specific and binding safe­ty valves against racial discrimination and in how the police exercised their unfettered discretion to impose pandemic measures has led to alarming phenomena of the police using their pandemic related powers to harass and further marginal­ise and exclude migrants from the public sphere. The deprivation of rights on the pretext of the pandemic was perhaps nowhere more apparent than in the case of welfare rights of vulnerable persons, including persons with disabilities, who saw their rights and benefits disappear during lockdown, with little resort to mechanisms for challenging these decisions. The ban on public protests was also a constant source of polit­ical tension in the public sphere, as it could not be supported by medical evidence and was viewed as an attempt to silence critics and shrink civil society space. Few measures were intro­duced to address the needs of the vulnerable during lock­downs – persons with disabilities, women who were vulnera­ble to domestic violence, single parents, the undeclared and undocumented workers, mostly fell through the cracks of the schemes introduced. Frontline workers were not adequately protected against the risk of infection and their special circum­stances were not adequately addressed by government meas­ures. In the field of education, the frequent calls to reduce the number of children in the classrooms, hire more teachers and provide all children with adequate software and hardware for online teaching were largely ignored, whilst discriminatory treatment and exclusion of children with disabilities became the norm. No measure was introduced to foster dialogue with society and forge the collaboration needed in order for govern­ment and society to join forces to fight the pandemic. Dialogue with the affected groups is necessary in order to re­view the situation which evolved during the pandemic and identify the areas where the government could have performed 1