Recent years have seen a remarkable expansion in the scale and importance of economic, social, and cultural rights (ESC rights), culminating in the adoption of the Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in December 2008. The Protocol gives individuals and groups the ability to bring complaints about rights violations before the UN Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. Against this background, this book focuses on the question of how fundamental socio-economic human rights enshrined in international law are defined, interpreted, understood, and implemented. It assesses how effective efforts to realize ESC rights have been and investigates the contemporary challenges obstructing their protection. It sets out the impact of the global financial crisis and austerity measures, the human rights responsibilities of corporations, and trends in the justiciability of those rights at the national and international level. The interrelationship between ESC rights and other legal regimes such as trade and investment law, environmental law, international criminal law, and international humanitarian law is also thoroughly examined. After an introduction by the editors the book contains seventeen chapters looking at the main questions which shape the progressive realization of ESC rights and their monitoring mechanisms. The authors of the chapters, both scholars and practitioners, adopt interdisciplinary approaches that move beyond traditional analyses of ESC rights. In doing so, they clarify and illuminate multiple aspects of the law by bringing together the different aspects of ESC rights, restating the challenges they face, and assessing the progress that has been made in expanding their adoption.

This title offers a selection of those major contributions which have shaped debate in the field of economic, social and cultural rights. The broad range of discussion includes: the nature of economic, social and cultural rights and the ability of courts to protect them; the effectiveness of non-judicial protective mechanisms at both the universal and the domestic level; ways of measuring whether states do enough to 'progressively realize' these rights; the impact of trade and investment liberalization, and of economic globalization generally, on the fulfilment of such rights; and the role of economic, social and cultural rights in development.

This exciting Research Handbook combines practitioner and academic perspectives to provide a comprehensive, cutting edge analysis of economic, social and cultural rights (ESCR), as well as the connection between ESCR and other rights. Offering an authoritative analysis of standards and jurisprudence, it argues for an expansive and inclusive approach to ESCR as human rights.

The first edition of this text was a textbook on internationally recognized economic, social and cultural rights. While focusing on this category of rights, it also analyzed their relationships to other human rights, civil and political in particular. This revised edition updates the information.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, arguably the founding document of the human rights movement, fully embraces economic, social, and cultural rights, as well as civil and political rights, within its text. However, for most of the fifty years since the Declaration was adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations, the focus of the international community has been on civil and political rights. This focus has slowly shifted over the past two decades. Recent international human rights treaties—such as the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women—grant equal importance to protecting and advancing nonpolitical rights. In this collection of essays, Isfahan Merali, Valerie Oosterveld, and a team of human rights scholars and activists call for the reintegration of economic, social, and cultural rights into the human rights agenda. The essays are divided into three sections. First the contributors examine traditional conceptualizations of human rights that made their categorization possible and suggest a more holistic rights framework that would dissolve such boundaries. In the second section they discuss how an integrated approach actually produces a more meaningful analysis of individual economic, social, and cultural rights. Finally, the contributors consider how these rights can be monitored and enforced, identifying ways international human rights agencies, NGOs, and states can promote them in the twenty-first century.

"One purpose of this book is to respond to this shift: to look beyond the more abstract and ideological discussions of the nature of socio-economic rights in order to engage empirically with how such rights have manifested in international practice". -- INTRODUCTION.

Economic, social, and cultural rights are protected by an international covenant, recently amended by the optional protocol which allows individuals to bring rights violations before a UN committee. This book addresses how successfully these rights are implemented and safeguarded worldwide, assessing the key challenges to their protection.