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Four members of the Council of Europe - Romania, Latvia, Moldova, and Armenia - have activated Article 15 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which allows derogations in cases of public emergency. Derogation allows Member States to take measures to the extent required by the situation as

In emergency legislation, the government of Norway proposed to exempt itself from current laws other than the Constitution and human rights so that it could issue new rules and regulations without needing Parliamentary debate even if they conflict with other laws. MPs may intervene if a third of

The identities of Montenegro's first two confirmed COVID-19 patients were published by social media users, including photos of one of the patients and her family, leading to online abuse based on their ethnicity and religious beliefs. Source: https://balkaninsight.com/2020/03/18/montenegrin

The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has authorised the country's internal security agency to use a previously secret tranche of mobile phone geolocation data, gathered to combat terrorism, to retrace the movements of individuals with confirmed cases of the coronavirus and identify people

Hong Kong is issuing electronic tracker wristbands to people under compulsory home quarantine to ensure they do not go out. The wristbands are accompanied by a mandatory smartphone app that shares their location with the government via messaging platforms such as WeChat and WhatsApp. Upon arriving

The Ecuadorian government has authorised tracking mobile phones via GPS satellite to ensure that citizens do not break mandatory quarantine after six violators were identified. Source: https://www.ecuadortv.ec/noticias/covid-19/romo-vigilancia-epidemiologico-covid19-? Writer: Ecuador TV Publication

The Chinese Communist Party has worked to control the narrative and deflect blame during the coronavirus crisis by drawing on its state and CCP-owned media to disseminate content via its English-language Facebook pages and Twitter feed (even though these platforms are banned in China). China has

Among the Chinese companies making efforts to help the country respond to the coronavirus are the technology giants Alibaba, Baidu, ByteDance, Tencent, Xiaomi, and Foxconn. In order to fight misinformation, Baidu created a map layer on top of its standard Map App that shows real-time locations of

The Polish government has developed the free Home Quarantine app for both iPhone and Android, which allows the police to check that individuals do not break quarantine; those who do may be fined up to PLN 5,000 and also offers support to those who are quarantined. Once users activate the app by

Metrolinx, the public transport agency for the Canadian province of Ontario says that, on request, it gave Toronto Public Health contact information associated with registered Presto payment cards used on specific trips, after a 40-year-old man was diagnosed with coronavirus (COVID-19). The agency

The Serb-dominated Republika Srpska, one of two entities that make up Bosnia and Herzegovina, is introducing fines of €500 to €1,500 (individuals) or €3,000 to €9,000 for spreading "panic and disorder" by publishing false news about the coronavirus outbreak in the media and on social networks

India has begun stamping the hands of people arriving at airports in the states of Maharashtra and Karnataka to specify the date until which they must remain in quarantine. The government is also using airline and railway reservation data to track suspected infections and find hand-stamped people

Technology entrepreneurs within Belgium would like to introduce a health code app similar to China's Alipay Health Code that would control individuals' movements based on their health status. The government has engaged privacy experts from the Belgian data protection authority and Ghent University

A phone-tracking system used by SAPOL for criminal investigations was used to better understand where a coronavirus-infected 60-year-old couple, who had travelled from Wuhan to visit relatives, roamed in Adelaide in order to identify people who might have been exposed, according to the South

Hakob Arshakyan, Armenia's minister of the high technology industry, has convened a research group comprising experts in IT and AI has been convened to collect and analyse data on the spread of coronavirus, compare it with the data collected by international partners, and develop forecasts. The

Mobile network operator O2 is providing aggregated data to the UK government to analyse anonymous smartphone location data in order to show people are following the country's social distancing guidelines, particularly in London, which to date accounts for about 40% of the UK's confirmed cases and 30