ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the human rights mobilisation of Sao Paulo City Hall's policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, arguing that the case of São Paulo illustrates how different human rights discursive choices made by state authorities informed the practice of such a phenomenon. The story of the COVID-19 pandemic is also one about people in cities. Fairclough's critical discourse analysis has been successfully employed in studying the human rights discourse in the context of Brazilian politics. Social theory and public policy scholarship have noticed that globalisation and contemporary urbanisation have been transforming cities into privileged places for autonomous policy-making in transnational agendas. While the Brazilian Constitution does not explicitly mention human rights as a municipal attribution, the competency for the realisation of a number of fundamental rights is either shared with municipalities or attributed exclusively to city governments.
