Fourteenth Global Studies Conference

Abstract

The global pandemic highlights the layered reality of global interdependency, the need for worldwide collaboration and the challenge of an international commitment to a unifying cause: eradication of the present threat to life and our way of living. Amidst government efforts to meet the challenge, and using ever more sophisticated technology, from reporting and testing, tracing and treating, the pandemic also underscored the reality of the need for greater safety of the human person, and the security of the safer person realized in the safeguarding—and even expanding—of human rights, especially those befitting a global biopolitical future. This paper examines why the active, collaborative protection of human rights, specifically the freedom of speech, mobility and travel, work and worship, along with education and healthcare access, the ethics of privacy (physical and data) and the protection of the vulnerable are of paramount importance for the flourishing global society. Subsequently, the focus turns, in outline, to how we may begin to accomplish this.