Human Rights and Te Tiriti o Waitangi: COVID-19 and Alert Level 4 in Aotearoa New Zealand Key recommendations Human Rights and Te Tiriti o Waitangi Deprivations of liberty • Ensure human rights and Te Tiriti based partnership across the Government’s COVID-19 response. A coordinated whole-of-government strategy building on the work begun last year towards a national action plan for the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. • With appropriate COVID 19 safety measures, provide unrestricted access to prisons, police cells, secure mental health and dementia units, youth justice facilities and care and protection residences for monitoring agencies (National Preventive Mechanisms). • Government and Mäori strengthen mechanisms to support partnership decision-making that affirms the käwanatanga of government and rangatiratanga of hapü, iwi, and Mäori. • Ensure the crucial role of National Preventive Mechanisms’ unrestricted visits is understood by detaining agencies and their access is incorporated into plans for dealing with emergencies. • Tiriti partners work together on all COVID-19 issues, including changes to alert levels. Personal Protective Equipment • Improve guidance on, and access to, PPE (masks, gloves and gowns) for home and community support workers. Racism • Make an express commitment to address racism as part of the COVID-19 response including explicit public messaging and awareness raising. • Prioritise the development of a National Action Plan Against Racism, anchored in Te Tiriti o Waitangi, as well as the views and experience of tangata whenua, and those communities who are currently feeling the impact of racism most acutely. Access to justice • Provide the Human Rights Review Tribunal (HRRT) with adequate resources to hear and decide claims remotely. • Support HRRT staff to work from home. • Encourage the HRRT to progress all existing claims and conduct hearings by alternative means, such as video link. Disability • Proactively involve disabled people in the drafting and production of materials and information and ensure accessible information is available and easy to locate. • Link tängata whaikaha (Mäori disabled people) to Mäori and disability COVID-19 response teams to benefit from, and contribute to, self-determined culturally effective and disability sensitive initiatives. • Ensure that disaggregated data on disability are collected to better understand how disabled people are affected by the pandemic. Contact tracing, surveillance and data use • Appropriately balance the right to privacy with the right to health when considering digital contact tracing to ensure that any impacts on people’s privacy are strictly necessary, lawful and proportionate. • Ensure digital contact information is only provided to public health workers, be of a minimal nature and be accessible only while COVID-19 remains a threat. • Ensure decisions on contact tracing, surveillance and data use are undertaken in partnership with iwi and Mäori and uphold rangatiratanga. 6