What Will COVID-19 Mean for Algeria’s Year-long Protests?

We’re already seeing this play out in other places on the continent. In Rwanda, police officers shot two individuals last month for disobeying COVID-19 lockdown orders. An outstanding overreaction considering in places like Italy, violators were simply fined. But in a country like Rwanda where President Paul Kagame’s authoritarian-like leadership and questionable choices are normally excused by liberal democracies because he has managed to keep a once crisis-ridden country relatively stable for almost 20 years, this occurrence shouldn’t come as a complete surprise. The global pandemic now provides leeway for heavy handed governments to do things that would normally be inexcusable within the international human rights community. After the shooting, the Rwandan Police tweeted, ‘People should not confuse the measures taken to prevent the spread of Covid-19 with this unfortunate incident,’ a potential covering of their tracks after receiving backlash.