The wrong sort of rights? CESR responds to Economist article on economic and social rights

The 24 March 2007 issue of The Economist magazine carried a leader article ("Stand up for your rights") which argued that economic and social rights were "a distraction" and that no useful purpose was served by viewing basic necessities such as food, health and housing as human rights.

The Economist also criticised the international human rights organization Amnesty International for "muffling what was once its central message" by broadening its focus to include economic, social and cultural rights. The article can be found at: http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=8888856

CESR sent the following letter to the editor in response to the Economist article on 2 April 2007. Other responses can be found on the Economist letters page http://www.economist.com/debate/theinbox

CESR LETTER TO THE EDITOR OF THE ECONOMIST, 2 April 2007

To the editor:

Your leader 'Stand up for your rights" (March 24th) reeks of nostalgia for the days of the Cold War, when the fight against communism kept economic and social rights off the mainstream human rights agenda. The reunification of human rights since then seems to have entirely passed you by.

Understanding freedom from preventable hunger and disease as a matter of rights is to recognize that these are as essential to human dignity as freedom of expression or conscience. Expanding civil and political freedoms is indispensable to combat poverty, but on its own cannot remedy the chronic levels of deprivation which continue to shock the conscience of humanity.

Economic and social rights bring a much needed focus on accountability to development discussions, underscoring the legal as well as moral obligation to guide public policy towards the fulfilment of all dimensions of human well-being. To governments they provide a normative framework for their efforts to tackle deprivation and marginalization; to those condemned to living in poverty and exclusion, an empowering avenue of redress.

Of course, human rights provide no easy prescriptions to such multifaceted problems as how to eradicate poverty. Assessing, for example, whether large-scale deaths from starvation, childbirth or infectious disease can be attributed to a government’s neglect of its human rights obligations requires sophisticated, inter-disciplinary tools of analysis that human rights and development practitioners have only begun to forge in recent years. Defining the limits of freedom of speech can be no less complex, yet the argument is seldom heard that freedom of expression is too unclear to be considered a human right.

You appear to ignore the progress made over the last 20 years by UN bodies, national courts and community-based struggles to make economic and social rights enforceable. Rather than being lambasted for diluting its focus, Amnesty International is to be commended for embracing a more holistic vision of human rights, and lending the credibility of its brand and the mobilising power of its worldwide membership to these efforts to make economic and social rights a reality.

Eitan Felner
Executive Director
Center for Economic and Social Rights