Conventional wisdom celebrates the great strides that have been made in recent years in relation to economic and social rights. The process of including those rights in constitutions has moved quickly in recent years. Courts in various countries have generated valuable case law, UN member states adopted a complaints mechanism (Optional Protocol) linked to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the UN has established several new mandates devoted to monitoring these rights. Indeed, international human rights bodies have devoted far more time to debating such rights than they once did.
In many respects, however, the approach currently taken by the international human rights system all but ensures the worst possible outcome. On the one hand, the correct approach insists that economic and social rights are indivisible from, and of equal importance to, civil and political rights, suggesting that they can provide a meaningful response to extreme poverty, extreme inequality and other forms of rampant social injustice. On the other hand, the international human rights system systematically marginalizes those rights, and tolerates a situation in which the majority of states avoids proper recognition of these rights and fails also to hold anyone to account when they are routinely ignored.
Many of the states that enjoy the world’s highest living standards have specifically rejected proposals to recognize economic and social rights in legislative or constitutional form. But even in countries whose constitutions deem economic and social rights to be justiciable the courts resist or reject proposals to implement them.
