Expendable Rights: Human Rights and Restrictions in Older People’s Care Homes During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic had a well-documented impact on practices, routines and lived experiences in older people’s care homes. International human rights law requires individual states to establish institutions—National Preventive Mechanisms —to report on torture and ill-treatment in places of detention, including care homes. Adopting documentary analysis of 36 NPM monitoring reports from 20 Council of Europe Countries between 2020 and 2022, this article explores the human rights implications that arose during the first 2 years of the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite legislative and regulatory differences across these jurisdictions, the reports reveal common patterns where COVID-19 created tensions between promoting human rights and placing restrictions on them. Four key themes arose around pre-existing sectoral pressures, the implementation of legal and regulatory measures in reaction to the pandemic, residents’ experiences of their rights and freedoms being disrupted and the proliferation of new ways of working in response to the pandemic. The result is a broad picture of practices that disrupted or abandoned the human rights of older people living in care homes across a range of nations, regardless of the differences in legal measures adopted in individual national contexts. A crucial observation is the pattern of implementary discretion and the gap between national policy and local practice, leading to the human rights of residents being viewed as expendable. As the sector continues to reflect on learning from the pandemic, this observation may support an environment where older people’s human rights are valued, affirmed, and promoted outside of pandemic conditions.