Amnesty International has been working on economic, social and cultural rights (ESCR) for nearly 15 years, but our relatively late arrival into this field has been part of the problem in establishing ESCR as “real” human rights. Many people continue to identify human rights with those civil and political rights that the organisation has traditionally worked on, such as prohibitions against torture, the death penalty, or arbitrary detention.
This problem was compounded by the fact that when Amnesty took up ESCR as a new issue, it was in addition to many other areas of on-going work, and extensive new resources were not available. To date, Amnesty’s work on ESCR has mostly focused on demanding these rights be respected and protected, without discrimination. However, Amnesty’s strategic plans for 2016 onwards aim to devote more attention to issues of resource distribution, in particular demanding the fulfilment of ESCR. One area is in regard to barriers to access to essential services, such as lack of affordable housing, or lack of free access to essential vital sexual and reproductive health services, including post-rape health care and emergency contraception; we will also look at the impact of privatisation of public services.
