Medical staffs swear in as members of "assault team" in the fight against the novel coronavirus-related pneumonia in a hospital in Wuhan, central China's Hubei Province, January 22, 2020. Photo: Xinhua

The Chinese government has guaranteed the basic human rights of citizens in its fight against the novel coronavirus outbreak, a study by a Chinese institute finds.

The Human Rights Institute, at Southwest University of Political Science and Law, organized and wrote an independent research report recently on The Basic Human Rights Protection in China's "Anti-coronavirus" War based on a large amount of data and materials during the epidemic prevention and control period.

The report covers nine aspects: life and health, equal protection, rule of law, measures to improve people's livelihood, information disclosure, humanistic care, community-level prevention and control, epidemic prevention supervision and international cooperation. 

The report analyzed how the government ensures human rights. For instance, the central government sent a professional steering group to Hubei Province to strengthen the frontline work of prevention and control; Hubei and its capital Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak, accelerated the construction of centralized admission hospital and did "early report, early isolation, early treatment"; all efforts were made to improve the admission rate and cure rate and reduce the infection rate and fatality rate.

China has always taken the people's right to life and health as the center and the protection of every citizen's basic rights as the starting point, said the report.

Zhang Yonghe, executive director of the Human Rights Research Institute, told the Global Times that control and preventive measures across Wuhan including the lockdown and quarantine, which the Western media and think tanks labelled as "violation of human rights," are a must as the coronavirus outbreak quickly spread and they were also righteous based on scientific judgment. 

"Anyone can understand this. Those Western forces rushed to link restricting movement of residents of Wuhan and adjoining areas to government abusing civil rights are simply lying," Zhang noted, adding that the measures taken by the Chinese government "should not be scolded but praised." 

Here is the full text of the report:  http://english.swupl.edu.cn/campuslife/swuplnews/278261.htm?from=singlemessage&isappinstalled=0