DUKE LAW NEWS — While governments around the world have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic in ways that violate human rights, other official efforts have tried to protect rights from incursion or even improve them. To track measures that advance civil and political, equality, governance, and socio-economic rights, Duke Law’s International Human Rights Clinic has launched an interactive website, “Catalyzing Rights: Index of Advances During COVID-19.” Containing more than 200 measures across 20 categories of human rights ranging from digital rights and fiscal policy responses to racial and gender equality, the index serves as both an accountability tool and a way to help advance a more rights-centric approach to the pandemic and beyond, said Clinical Professor of Law Aya Fujimura-Fanselow, the clinic’s supervising attorney. “While the pandemic has both uncovered and intensified human rights violations, governments have also put into place measures that not only protect but even promote and advance rights,” Fujimura-Fanselow said. “By identifying such measures, our tracker will help hold governments to account, enable a re-imagining of what is possible, and equip human rights advocates with additional strategies to achieve these goals.”