Author: BlackMask Financial

BRUSSELS – France and Bolivia have postponed elections. Peru handed its president broad new legislative authority. Israel sharply ramped up the reach of its surveillance state. While leaders around the world fight the spread of the coronavirus, they’re amassing sweeping new powers. As legislatures limit or suspend activities in the name of social distancing, many of the norms that define democracy – elections, deliberation and debate, checks and balances – have been put on indefinite hold. The speed and breadth of the transformation is unsettling political scientists, government watchdogs and rights groups. Many concede that emergency declarations and streamlining government decision-making are necessary responses to a global health threat. But they question how readily leaders will give up the powers they’ve accrued when the coronavirus eventually subsides.

“This is a situation where it’s far too easy to make arguments for undue interference with civil rights and liberties,” said Tomas Valasek, a Slovak lawmaker.

The country that has attracted the most notice for a lurch away from democratic reforms is Hungary, which last month handed Prime Minister Viktor Orban near-dictatorial powers. Orban was already facing the prospect of sanctions from the European Union over concerns that he had packed courts with loyalists, closed down opposition media outlets and changed the country’s constitution to ensure that he remains in power. The new measure gives him authority to legislate by decree, free from parliamentary oversight, for as long as he deems necessary to fight the coronavirus, and it imposes steep penalties for spreading “false information” – a step critics fear will be used to further impede the opposition. But even countries with robust traditions of freedom and dissent have imposed measures nearly overnight that under other circumstances would look more familiar in an authoritarian state. In Belgium, authorities have requisitioned cellphone companies’ location tracking data to make sure people are not straying too far from home. Police checkpoints on major streets monitor what the phone companies miss.

“It doesn’t just take the despots and the illiberals of this world, like Orban, to wreak damage,” said Valasek, who has been involved in negotiating Slovakia’s pandemic response. “We need to make sure that we don’t go a single inch further than absolutely necessary in curtailing civil liberties in the name of fighting for public health.”

Past moments of extreme anxiety have given rise to measures that long outlived the crisis they were imposed to address. After the assassination of President Anwar Sadat in 1981, for example, Egyptians lived 31 more years under a state of emergency that granted the government sweeping security powers. The state of emergency declared in France after terrorist attacks in November 2015 remained in place for two years – and was ended only after many of the surveillance powers it enabled were made permanent. And in the United States, the 9/11 attacks led to emergency measures that persist to this day. The detention center in Guantánamo Bay is still open. Targeted drone killings continue. Under the Patriot Act, mass surveillance is still possible.”September 11th is the appropriate analogy,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. “We had a fearful public that was willing to countenance a government that was taking steps that undermined civil rights and were difficult to reverse over a long time.”I fear that we’re entering a parallel period.”Pandemics present unique challenges to societies that depend on the free movement of people and information. Tracking contagion requires wide surveillance. Social distancing means parliaments cannot meet to vote. Protests can’t take over public squares. Campaigning and even elections come into question. Many leaders have now seized broad powers to place their citizens under surveillance. In Israel, the cabinet bypassed parliament to approve an emergency measure that allows the government to use the cellphone location data of suspected coronavirus patients to make sure they adhere to quarantine rules and to notify people with whom they may have been in contact. In South Korea, a raucous democracy, extensive contact tracing previously used mostly as a counterterrorism technique helped authorities reconstruct webs of people who might have been exposed to the coronavirus and quickly clamp down on its spread. Nick Note: The masses gain freedom with the edge of a sword or the bang of a bullet AND lose it with the stroke of the pen! Sorry about that!