Tacking Economic Inequality Through Human Rights
An Overview of Materials from the Center for Economic and Social Rights
Extreme economic inequality is increasingly recognized as one of the most pervasive threats to human rights of our time and CESR has been actively challenging it for many years. Our research demonstrates how deliberate policy choices such as draconian austerity measures, regressive and discriminatory tax policies, unfair labor market policies, and weak social protection systems all corrode human rights.
CESR counters these unjust policy choices with various forms of advocacy. We work with partners in several countries to bring evidence of inequitable policies before human rights accountability mechanisms so they can call for redistributive alternatives. CESR challenges influential economic and development governance institutions, like the IMF, on policy prescriptions that feed economic inequality and we deploy the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development as a spur to action toward more redistributive policies on multiple levels. We seek to generate greater human rights accountability around transnational tax abuse and we work to enable an array of partners to address economic inequality as a human rights issue, fostering skills among social movement networks and supporting treaty bodies and other intergovernmental actors in collaborative efforts.
