Economic and Social Rights: Taking Stock
Significant changes have occurred in the field of economic andsocial rights since the Center for Economic and Social Rights (CESR)was established in 1993. The international community has givenincreasing recognition to the indivisibility and interdependence of allhuman rights: civil, political, economic, social, and cultural. At thesame time, extraordinary progress has been made by the UN Committee onEconomic and Social Rights, the UN special rapporteurs, and theacademic community in elucidating the content of economic and socialrights and the nature of concomitant state obligations.
However, in spite of these positive developments, the worldwidepromotion and protection of economic and social rights remains adifficult challenge. While millions of people are deprived of cleanwater, primary health care, and basic education, most states recognizeeconomic and social rights as little more than abstract declarations ofprinciples. When governments and international organizations addressproblems of health, education, clean water, and housing, they oftenframe these as development challenges rather than human rightsobligations. Although this is at least partially because acceptingthese as questions of rights implicitly means acknowledging governmentaccountability, the human rights movement must also develop morerigorous tools to monitor these rights.
CESR's New Approach
Economic and social rights obligations are often erroneouslyperceived by development practitioners and government officials ascomprising a list of absolute requirements imposed by internationallawyers???a list that would overlook substantial differences countrieshave in terms of resources and ignore competing priorities. In fact,the nature of state obligations elaborated in the InternationalCovenant of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights is characterized bythe requirement that each state party take steps toward "achievingprogressively the full realization of [ESC] rights" to "the maximum ofits available resources."
Any adequate economic and social rights monitoring methodology musttherefore take into account both resource availability and the notionof the ???progressive realization??? of these rights. Such a monitoringmechanism requires quantitative research tools that are typically notpart of the research toolkit of human rights organizations. While thehuman rights movement has been adept at using the law to change publicpolicies and using politics to change the law, it has not yet madesufficient use of the social sciences.
The contribution that social scientists can offer to the humanrights movement goes well beyond significantly increasing the abilityof the human rights community to use statistical data. The wealth ofresearch produced by economists, sociologists, political scientists andother social scientists about education, health, forms of inequality,and other human development issues???a whole field that most human rightsNGOs 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 restructuringits programmatic focus in order to fill this important gap. To achievethis, CESR is exploring a three-prongedapproach: 1) integrating a socio-economic analysis conducted bydevelopment economists and other social scientists; with 2) a legalanalysis of international human rights standards while also 3)gathering individual testimonies, a technique that has proven verypowerful to human rights advocacy work. CESR is currently developing this multidisciplinary methodology.
These unique monitoring tools are aimed to serve as the backbone forour advocacy work to bring about concrete policy changes to improvesocial and economic rights in multiple contexts.
Using this multidisciplinary approach, CESR willmonitor the multiple dimensions of governments??? obligations pertainingto economic and social rights, focusing in particular on those rightsviolations that can be identified and critically assessed only throughthe use of socio-economic tools and quantitative methods. The mostobvious cases for which such tools are required are those related tothe availability of resources. For example, CESR willcompare the growth of a state???s available resources (measured by percapital national income) with changes in socio-economic indicators(e.g. percentage of primary school enrollment or percentage of peoplewith access to clean water), which can help identify potentialviolations related to the lack of progressive realization of economicand social rights according to maximum available resources.
Quantitative tools are also necessary in order to analyzediscriminatory policies related to resource allocations (as opposed todiscriminatory laws or lack of enforcement of laws). For example, CESR willconduct budget analyses and use indicators disaggregated by race,ethnicity, or gender in order to gauge the extent to which largedisparities among groups within a country in education and healthoutcomes (e.g. child mortality or enrollment in primary education), maybe the result of (or exacerbated by) discriminatory policies in publicsocial spending.
The unique power of CESR???s new approachwill be in the combination of methods and strategies. A rigorouseconomic analysis of quantitative data will provide objective validityto claims that often the problem is not resource availability butrather resource distribution. The rich normative categories of a humanrights framework???of individual dignity and governmentaccountability???can then provide a powerful ethical, legal, andpolitical tool to critique these policies. And while statistics arevital 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 monitoringmethodologies and advocacy strategies with those of rigoroussocio-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.