For many months, the Covid 19 pandemic has weighed on the lives of everyone. In the name of the fight against the pandemic and, through it, of the preservation of the health and life of the population, limitations on fundamental rights and freedoms have been imposed, directly or indirectly, on an absolutely considerable, even unprecedented scale and duration. The confrontation of this crisis has constituted, in all legal spheres – national, European and international – an unprecedented laboratory for the emergence of new questions and hypotheses on the point of balance to be reached between rival rights, and on the expected role of public authority. On the one hand, public authorities are expected to prevent the violence that the pandemic exerts, in an unequal and insidious manner, on certain vulnerable groups of the population. On the other hand, the public response deployed to limit the spread of the virus constitutes, in itself, a violence that must be moderated.
The purpose of this bilingual symposium is to identify these issues and to test these hypotheses. It will develop an interdisciplinary approach and will bring to the forefront the European, international and comparative dimensions of the issues addressed. Bringing together speakers from various Belgian and foreign universities, this symposium is the result of a joint initiative by the research centres attached to all the universities of the French Community and the University of Luxembourg, in partnership with the Egmont Institute.
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