# Expectations and human rights protection: the case of Vietnam during COVID-19

## TL;DR

The paper explores how expectations influence human rights protection during the COVID-19 pandemic in Vietnam.

## Contribution

It introduces 'expectations' as a new concept in bioethical and health law studies.

## Key findings

- Expectations help explain complex social interactions and decision-making in real-world contexts.
- Changes in expectations require changes in policies and institutions to better protect human rights.
- Undue expectations must be constrained through checks and balances mechanisms.

## Abstract

Background: A key part of the complexity of actual social life lies in the fact that it operates on a large web of not only prescribed norms and rules, but also explicit and especially implicit expectations which constantly interact with each other.

Methods: This paper offers the first in-depth study on ‘expectations’ in bioethical and health law studies, taking Vietnamese human rights issues in response to coronavirus disease (COVID-19) as illustrations. It defines ‘expectations’ as normative imaginaries that can induce or guide actions and inactions at individual and collective levels.

Results: The study suggests that ‘expectations’ is a fruitful concept for bioethical and health law studies because it helps better understand the complexity of interactions in society and patterns of thinking and acting of actors in real-world contexts. Studying expectations also has implications for how human rights and other ethical norms can be better realized in practice. From applying the concept of ‘expectations’ to study human rights issues in Vietnam, this paper also argues that for better protection of human rights, there must be changes concerning expectations of involved parties.

Conclusions: Changes in expectations in turn call for changes in stimulus, knowledge, praxis, polices, laws and institutions. Meanwhile, checks and balances mechanisms must effectively constrain the materialization of undue expectations.