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Notes -
I’m not totally anti-restrictions, but those restrictions, should be either voted on by publicly elected representatives in open sessions, or be done only in extreme emergencies, and even then must have a date or publicly acknowledged end condition at which point the restrictions lift. The Covid restrictions were not voted in open sessions of the legislature, nor did they have an officially declared ending condition or date. The public was locked down and restricted by the fiat of the health departments and had no public end. The end of those restrictions would come when an unelected government official accountable to no one outside the department decreed that the “free” public would thus be allowed to resume their lives.
Not sure how it worked where you lived, but in most EU countries the parliament had to pass a law to give the executive branch emergency powers to respond to the crisis.
Yes, isn’t that what happened? At least where I lived, all emergency powers had a built-in expiration date and a vote had to be passed every few months throughout the pandemic in order to extend them.
If you live in an authoritarian country where the executive branch can enact a state of emergency with 0 accountability and have it persist without requiring any votes, that’s another problem entirely. In functional democracies, suspension of civil liberties was not done without significant scrutiny and legislation.
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