A New Approach to Monitoring and Advocating for Economic and Social Rights
Economic and Social Rights: Taking Stock
Significant changes have occurred in the field of economic and social rights since the Center for Economic and Social Rights (CESR) was established in 1993. The international community has given increasing recognition to the indivisibility and interdependence of all human rights: civil, political, economic, social, and cultural. At the same time, extraordinary progress has been made by the UN Committee on Economic and Social Rights, the UN special rapporteurs, and the academic community in elucidating the content of economic and social rights and the nature of concomitant state obligations.
However, in spite of these positive developments, the worldwide promotion and protection of economic and social rights remains a difficult challenge. While millions of people are deprived of clean water, primary health care, and basic education, most states recognize economic and social rights as little more than abstract declarations of principles. When governments and international organizations address problems of health, education, clean water, and housing, they often frame these as development challenges rather than human rights obligations. Although this is at least partially because accepting these as questions of rights implicitly means acknowledging government accountability, the human rights movement must also develop more rigorous tools to monitor these rights.
CESR's New Approach
Economic and social rights obligations are often erroneously perceived by development practitioners and government officials as comprising a list of absolute requirements imposed by international lawyers—a list that would overlook substantial differences countries have in terms of resources and ignore competing priorities. In fact, the nature of state obligations elaborated in the International Covenant of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights is characterized by the requirement that each state party take steps toward "achieving progressively the full realization of [ESC] rights" to "the maximum of its available resources."
Any adequate economic and social rights monitoring methodology must therefore take into account both resource availability and the notion of the “progressive realization” of these rights. Such a monitoring mechanism requires quantitative research tools that are typically not part of the research toolkit of human rights organizations. While the human rights movement has been adept at using the law to change public policies and using politics to change the law, it has not yet made sufficient use of the social sciences.
The contribution that social scientists can offer to the human rights movement goes well beyond significantly increasing the ability of the human rights community to use statistical data. The wealth of research produced by economists, sociologists, political scientists and other social scientists about education, health, forms of inequality, and other human development issues—a whole field that most human rights NGOs are largely unaware of—can significantly enhance the quality of the monitoring capabilities of the human rights movement.
The Center for Economic and Social Rights is currently restructuring its programmatic focus in order to fill this important gap. To achieve this, CESR is exploring a three-pronged approach: 1) integrating a socio-economic analysis conducted by development economists and other social scientists; with 2) a legal analysis of international human rights standards while also 3) gathering individual testimonies, a technique that has proven very powerful to human rights advocacy work. CESR is currently developing this multidisciplinary methodology.
These unique monitoring tools are aimed to serve as the backbone for our advocacy work to bring about concrete policy changes to improve social and economic rights in multiple contexts.
Using this multidisciplinary approach, CESR will monitor the multiple dimensions of governments’ obligations pertaining to economic and social rights, focusing in particular on those rights violations that can be identified and critically assessed only through the use of socio-economic tools and quantitative methods. The most obvious cases for which such tools are required are those related to the availability of resources. For example, CESR will compare the growth of a state’s available resources (measured by per capital national income) with changes in socio-economic indicators (e.g. percentage of primary school enrollment or percentage of people with access to clean water), which can help identify potential violations related to the lack of progressive realization of economic and social rights according to maximum available resources.
Quantitative tools are also necessary in order to analyze discriminatory policies related to resource allocations (as opposed to discriminatory laws or lack of enforcement of laws). For example, CESR will conduct budget analyses and use indicators disaggregated by race, ethnicity, or gender in order to gauge the extent to which large disparities among groups within a country in education and health outcomes (e.g. child mortality or enrollment in primary education), may be the result of (or exacerbated by) discriminatory policies in public social spending.
The unique power of CESR’s new approach will be in the combination of methods and strategies. A rigorous economic analysis of quantitative data will provide objective validity to claims that often the problem is not resource availability but rather resource distribution. The rich normative categories of a human rights framework—of individual dignity and government accountability—can then provide a powerful ethical, legal, and political tool to critique these policies. And while statistics are vital to assessing the scope of a human rights problem, CESR will also use the testimonies of individuals to show the impact of those problems on people’s lives.
By combining the strengths of traditional human rights monitoring methodologies and advocacy strategies with those of rigorous socio-economic research, CESR intends to fill a major gap in the international human rights movement and make a significant contribution to its ability to hold governments accountable for violations of economic and social rights.
This pioneering approach has garnered overwhelming support from key human rights advocates, development economists, and other social scientists.
