I recently read an article in which protesters were fined thousands of dollars for violating "health codes". A country who cannot allow protest is no free country at all.
The right to protest during a pandemic is dubious, in direct conflict with other peoples rights. It is also self defeating, when the majority consider the protesters arseholes for willfully endangering the general community and don't get around to considering the actual issue being protested.
If other people aren't afraid of the virus, you have no right to stop them; it's their choice. Now maybe you could argue you have a right to keep them out of your house, or your personal space, if you don't want to be infected, but you have absolutely no right to stop them meeting on the street far from you.
> You do so have a right to take measures for public health, which may well involve arresting people who ignore the necessary measures.
Do you even understand what a right means? Rights, be it as defined by the US constitution or the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, are inherent moral rights, it's not something the government can freely suspend based on some arbitrary utilitarian justification like case numbers. The whole point of those declarations of rights is protecting people from authoritarian governments; if the government has the power to suspend those rights, you have no rights!
Tell me in which declaration of rights is there a right to have armed police attack and lock up people peacefully assembling on the street?
And if you don't believe in rights, believe anything is moral as long as an elected government makes it law, then consider this. Would you still feel that way if the democratically elected government decided it was okay to rape worik's wife/daughter/mother? Would you still feel that way if the democratically elected government decided worik's ethnic group should be sent to gas chambers for cleansing? If not, then clearly you do believe in absolute rights.
What the hell? Nobody sitting at home in their house has the right to prevent other people meeting peacefully on the street. People like you are what's wrong with Australia, you authoritarian monster! Nobody has the right to stop other people meeting because they might spread a virus to eachother with a 99%+ survival rate that might somehow eventually find its way back to them.
Willfully violating health orders endangers others, who are forced to share public spaces. As a community, we decided the law to protect ourselves (security of person) and the vulnerable (the people who don't have a 99% survival rate if they catch COVID; the immunosuppressed, the elderly, the chronically ill). Under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we are entitled to security of person and protection by the law. And yes, it also declares several articles further down the right to protest. So the rights are in direct conflict.
It is also worth noting that people can still protest. They just can't do it while violating health orders. Yelling maskless at police on lockdown days is going to get you arrested. Other protests on non-lockdown days with people maintaining social distancing have proceeded fine apart from grumpy words and fear mongering by politicians.
