A/HRC/45/44 disparities are also apparent in the enforcement of COVID-19-related social restrictions. 72. Some States have politicized the current public health emergency to evade their human rights obligations, and made troubling public statements alleging a need to suspend civil rights and human rights, including by instituting indefinite detention, denying access to asylum, suspending affirmative action and environmental regulations, and curtailing reproductive rights. Such measures facilitate severe violations of the human rights of the people of African descent. States must navigate the COVID-19 pandemic without escalating or creating additional crises for people of African descent. 73. Notably, the human rights framework offers important lessons in the context of global pandemics, where people of African descent risk being left behind in terms of their access to the right to health, including medicines, treatments and vaccines. For example, in South Africa, civil society has situated its call for access to HIV medications within the right to health,52 which has facilitated reductions in the price of medicines, the prevention of hundreds of thousands of HIV-related deaths, and forced significant additional resources into the health system, and towards people living in poverty in particular. 74. In several cases, citizens and protesters recording serious police misconduct have been fined or prosecuted for recording the misconduct that would not be established without the very recording criminalized. In Spain, this has been a significant feature of enforcement of COVID-19-related restrictions. The deleterious effects of the Law on the Security of Citizens on the rights of people of African descent have reportedly pushed them into self-censorship, resulting in underreporting of discriminatory acts, failure to investigate and prosecute perpetrators and provide redress to victims (A/HRC/39/69/Add.2, para. 21). 75. The COVID-19 pandemic has also shown how discretion licenses systemic racism in education. Globally, for students of African descent, “learning loss” from interruption of the academic year, or lack of resources, may be misdiagnosed as lack of student aptitude, thereby reinforcing the racial bias of educators. The criminalization of school discipline continues. Failure to use “criterion reference assessment” (that is, requiring planning to achieve educational attainment targets irrespective of learning loss) rather than “norm reference assessments” could be a devastating policy decision not to invest in students left furthest behind, masked by satisfaction at student growth rather than student adequacy. 76. In the United States, 17 per cent of students lack adequate Internet access for online learning; a further 18 per cent of students have only one connected device in their homes. In the United Kingdom, where families reported having Internet access, existing computers were prioritizsed for children’s schoolwork. Students of African descent compete with parents’ and siblings’ online needs. 77. In the United Kingdom, routine underprediction of grades for Black students may strengthen racial discrimination, as student grades were assessed by teacher prediction and then normed. Some 40 per cent of all students saw their grades worsen from teacher assessments, which are themselves on occasion a source of systemic racism.53 These data have not yet been released disaggregated by race, despite concerns of bias.54 In the United States, where most essential workers are people of African descent, the sharp decrease in federal financial aid renewals in 2020 points to a likely increase in dropout rates for university students whose presence is required at home.55 52 53 54 55 16 See Mark Heywood, “South Africa's treatment action campaign: combining law and social mobilization to realize the right to health”, Journal of Human Rights Practice, vol. 1, No. 1, (March 2009), p. 14. Sean Coughlin, “Why did the A-level algorithm say no?”, BBC, 15 August 2020). Hannah Richardson, “GCSE and A-level results ‘could be affected by bias’”, BBC, 11 July 2020. Madeline St. Amour, “FAFSA renewals down, especially for lower-income students”, Inside Higher Ed, 27 May 2020.