Fifty Shades of Lockdown

LAW SCHOLAR ELISA BERTOLINI OBSERVES THE LEGISLATIVE MEASURES PUT IN PLACE OR NOT BY INDIVIDUAL GOVERNMENTS ACROSS THE WORLD DURING THE PANDEMIC

Faced with the pandemic, the world fragmented into a puzzle made of different identities and sensitivities. If the introduction of lockdowns has been a common denominator in most nations, there are countries where governments have applied softer measures for containment, in accordance with local culture, current legislation or interests of the ruling class.
 
Elisa Bertolini, Professor of Comparative Public Law, has dedicated several studies to countries that have deployed alternative strategies to combat the virus. “In one in particular, we described the different shades of denial observed by presidents who have, either denied the existence of COVID or downplayed its danger, and even suggested weird remedies. Really fake news that we did not hesitate to define bullshit news when we glimpsed in them not only the desire to pass false information but also disinterest in the consequences of what was being asserted.”
 
Under the lens of the study the attitudes and motivations expressed by the presidents of US and Brazil, but also extreme cases such as Turkmenistan and North Korea, where COVID is not even mentioned publicly, to end with China, where the interventionist stance on the domestic front was accompanied by poor communication with respect to the external world. “We have neither the data nor the skills to assess the effectiveness of these different provisions and draft a historical balance sheet of the. For example, how the coronavirus issue is going to affect the US elections, we can only speculate", clarifies the scholar. “Ours is a comparison from a legal point of view on the legislative measures put in place or not by individual governments. The aim is to raise a broader question concerning the relationship between science and politics. Who is the decision-maker in this case: the scientist who has the knowledge or the politician who has the democratic responsibility to do so?”.
 
Following the common thread of these investigations and also because of her interest in Japan, in a second research study Bertolini treated the case of the soft lockdown put in place by the Tokyo government, which affected her directly. “It was also defined as an ethical lockdown, because the Japanese juridical system does not actually provide the government with legal tools to adopt a more coercive stance vis-à-vis the population. One of the objectives of the constitution, written in the aftermath of WWII under American tutelage, was to prevent a strong executive from being recreated in the country, and therefore no special provisions were envisaged that could be activated in emergency situations, as conversely happened elsewhere, Italy in the first place. Furthermore, there is a general distrust in the population towards radically restrictive measures, and for this reason the government was unable to do otherwise than proceeding with a mild lockdown.” The outcome, however, seems to have been effective given the low numbers of COVID infections under Mount Fuji. "That is true", concludes the professor, “But I suspect that the distancing from the virus was facilitated, rather than by the soft restrictions, by the fact of Japan being an island, so that geography was more decisive than politics.”
 
Visit the COVID Crisis Lab website.

by Emanuele Elli
Translated by Alex Foti