Part of a law which allowed the Colombian government to charge for primary education was deemed unconstitutional after a pair of Colombian lawyers, collaborating with the law faculty at New York’s Cornell University and a coalition of civil society organisations, brought a direct challenge against its discriminatory provisions.
An animated video created by ESCR-Net to promote the ratification of the Optional Protocol to the International Convention on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.
The video, which is three minutes long, is about a twelve-year-old girl named Lucy who has to fight for her right to education when her school is closed due to a lack of public funds. Ultimately, Lucy proves that access to justice is key to the full enjoyment of human rights.
Vidéo d'animation créée par ESCR-Net pour promouvoir la ratification du Protocole facultatif à la Convention internationale sur les droits économiques, sociaux et culturels.
La vidéo, qui est de trois minutes, parle d'une fille de douze ans nommée Lucy qui doit se battre pour son droit à l'éducation lorsque son école est fermée en raison d'un manque de fonds publics. En fin de compte, Lucy prouve que l'accès à la justice est la clé de la pleine jouissance des droits de l'homme, y compris le droit à l'éducation.
This 'Right to Education Info Packet' on Tanzania aims at informing about the right to education, its legal, political, and social considerations, and some examples of its potential uses in litigation.
Laws are not only regulations the government enforces upon the people; they are regulations the people are to enforce upon the government. Laws just do not magically change things; they are tools to be used in court to hold others accountable so as to bring about change. Thus, it is the objective of this publication not to fill your head with heaps of information about a right that you cannot achieve but to enlighten you on tools that exist and how you may use them to attain your rights.
The 'Info Packet' provides guidance to litigate issues related to free primary education, expulsion of pregnant students, corporal punishment and education financing.
The Guide identifies equality and non-discrimination strategies that NGOs, lawyers and activists may employ in seeking to advance economic and social rights (ESRs) before courts. It is also accompanied by an online Compendium of useful cases in which equality and non-discrimination concepts and approaches have been employed to advance ESRs.
The Guide is split into three parts. Having introduced the rights framework, the Guide identifies conceptual and practical reasons why equality and non-discrimination arguments should be employed when challenging violations of ESRs. It then presents clear and practical guidance on how to use equality and non-discrimination strategies in courtrooms around the world.
The adoption of the OP-ICESCR is only a beginning and that the real challenges lay ahead.
This Commentary is intended to benefit claimants and their advocates and to provide a broader resource for states and the Committee – providing a deeper jurisprudential base on the range of issues likely to be raised. In so doing, the Commentary charts in effect both the legal opportunities but also the limitations.
This guide, issued by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), focuses on how civil society can follow up on recommendations of United Nations (UN) human rights mechanisms and mandates or bodies.
Part I provides an analysis of the various legal issues commonly encountered in economic, social and cultural rights litigation. These include identifying the relevant sources of law, establishing justiciability, defining the nature and scope of rights and obligations, responding to the defences available to governments, and the crafting of appropriate remedies. The next chapters address the right to legal aid for economic, social and cultural rights litigation, specific rights (social security, housing, health and education), as well as the social rights of children. This will provide the user of the manual with a sense of how the application and interpretation of economic, social and cultural rights may vary depending on the group claiming the right and the particular right at issue.
In Parts II and III, the various regional and international complaints procedures are outlined. For each human rights mechanism, there is a description of the relevant legal instruments, the applicable economic, social and cultural rights standards and the responsible adjudicatory body. The procedure for making a complaint is set out in detail, together with the limitations of the various procedure. Each chapter concludes with a brief analysis of the jurisprudence of judicial or quasi-judicial bodies and a list of useful resources. The remainder of the manual seeks to provide the user with a range of practical resources for litigation.
Part IV sets out summaries of leading cases on economic, social and cultural rights,
In this report, the Special Rapporteur argues that treating economic and social rights as human rights is essential both for efforts to eliminate extreme poverty and to ensure a balanced and credible approach in the field of human rights as a whole. He argues that economic and social rights currently remain marginal in most contexts, thus undermining the principle of the indivisibility of the two sets of rights.
Conventional wisdom celebrates the great strides that have been made in recent years in relation to economic and social rights. At the international level, the Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights has been adopted, an impressive number of special procedures have been created to focus on these rights and bodies like the Human Rights Council spend much more time than they once did debating these issues. At the national level, economic and social rights proponents celebrate the impressive degree of constitutional recognition of some or most economic and social rights, the growing capacity of courts in many countries to enforce them, the growth of national non-governmental organisations working on economic and social rights and the emergence of a vibrant scholarly literature on the justiciability of those rights.
However, despite important recent progress, the reality is that economic and social rights remain largely invisible in the law and institutions of the great majority of States. In support of this proposition, the Special Rapporteur notes that: many of the States whose Constitutions recognise economic and social rights have not translated that recognition into a human rights-based legislative framework; the increasingly widespread constitutional acceptance of the justiciability of economic and social rights contrasts with the resistance of many of the relevant courts to acting on these rights; many of the States that enjoy the world’s highest living standards have specifically rejected proposals to recognise economic and social rights in legislative or constitutional form; most national-level institutional mechanisms for promoting human rights neglect economic and social rights; and national economic and social rights accountability mechanisms are generally much rarer than mainstream accounts would suggest.
The extent to which economic and social rights remain unacknowledged as human rights is the frequency with which debates about economic and social rights slide imperceptibly and almost naturally into broad discussions of development. But, in fact, development initiatives might not be rights-promoting, or even rights-protecting. In this report, the Special Rapporteur spells out why it matters that economic and social rights be treated as human rights and examines the ways in which this can be done by outlining the recognition, institutionalisation and accountability (RIA) framework that focuses primary attention on ensuring recognition of the rights, institutional support for their promotion and accountability mechanisms for their implementation.