Social rights in international law: categorization versus indivisibility

Abstract

This introductory contribution starts by defining social rights as a subcategory of the broader category of economic, social and cultural rights in accordance with the ordinary meaning of these terms in international human rights law. It continues with a short history of how economic, social and cultural rights developed as an antithesis to the bourgeois concept of civil and political rights during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) of 1948 achieved a remarkable synthesis between both broad dimensions of human rights, the Cold War was characterized by a fierce political battle between the Western and the socialist concepts of human rights, which led to the adoption of two International Covenants, based on the doubtful ideological assumption that there was a fundamental legal difference between civil and political rights on the one hand, and economic, social and cultural rights on the other, with respect to the nature of state obligations and adequate measures of national and international monitoring and implementation. After the end of the Cold War, this legal categorization was gradually replaced by the doctrine of the equality, interdependence and indivisibility of all human rights and the recognition of obligations of states to respect, protect and fulfil, which apply equally to all human rights. These different types of state obligations are explained by means of various examples, above all in the field of social rights laid down in Article 25 UDHR as well as in Articles 9 to 12 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) of 1966.