Economic, social and cultural rights

Everyone, everywhere has the right to live with dignity.  The means that no one should be denied their rights to education, adequate housing, food, water and sanitation, the highest attainable standard of health, and other economic, social and cultural rights.

Since the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, the international community has recognized that all human rights are indivisible.

However, while economic, social and cultural rights were marginalized for much of the 20th century, now larger numbers of individuals and organizations are acting to reclaim these rights.  Nevertheless, still greater efforts are needed to ensure the respect, protection and fulfilment of these rights for everyone, everywhere.

For more than 45 years, Amnesty International has mobilized millions of people around the world. It has constantly adapted its focus to address the pressing human rights concerns of the day.  Today its work also addresses:

• the global epidemic of mass forced evictions;
• the widespread denial of access to essential health services;
• discrimination against people living with HIV/AIDS;
• discrimination against girls and minorities in access to education.

Hunger, homelessness and preventable disease are not inevitable social problems or purely the result of a lack of resources – they are the result of laws, policies and action that undermine people’s human rights.

What are economic, social and cultural rights?

• The right to adequate housing includes protection from forced eviction and access to affordable, habitable and culturally appropriate housing;
• Cultural rights includes the rights of minorities and Indigenous peoples to preservation and protection of their cultural identity;
• The right to education includes the right to free and compulsory primary education and to progressively available, accessible, acceptable and adaptable education;
• The right to food including freedom from hunger and access at all times to sufficient nutritious food or the means to obtain it;
• The right to health is the right to the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health, including healthy living conditions and available, accessible, acceptable quality health services;
• The right to water and sanitation is the right to sufficient water and sanitation which is physically and economically accessible, and is safe;
• The right to work and rights at work is the right to freely chosen work and to just and fair conditions of employment, protection against forced labour and rights to form and join trade unions.

Who is responsible?

States, through national governments, have the primary responsibility to realize human rights. They must respect, protect and fulfil economic, social and cultural rights (ESC rights).

Where states lack the necessary resources to realize ESC rights, they should seek and receive international assistance to do so. The violation of ESC rights is not just about inadequate resources; it is a matter of unwillingness, negligence and discrimination.

States increasingly cooperate in international trade agreements.  International companies are headquartered in one country and yet operate in another.  States support other countries through international development assistance.  States act together through international financial institutions.  All this amounts to the reality that States also have human rights obligations beyond their borders.   In these and other cases, governments must ensure that they do not violate human rights abroad, that they protect the population of other countries from abuses caused by those they should regulate, and they should act to support the realization of human rights universally, ensuring non-discrimination and prioritizing the most vulnerable.

Companies too have the responsibility to ensure that they do not contribute to human rights violations, no matter where they operate.

  

In fact, assistance to marginalized people is not a matter of charity: it is a human rights obligation.

What is Amnesty International doing?
As Amnesty International members join local communities and activists worldwide in campaigning for the realization of economic, social and cultural rights, we continue to expose the reality of grave abuses of these rights on real women, men and children, putting a human face to the bald statistics of deprivation and neglect.

We call for the legal enforcement of ESC rights and for an end to grave abuses that target marginalised and excluded people.

Our work for ESC rights is not divorced from our work for civil and political rights; instead they reinforce each other so that through everything we do, we reflect our conviction that human rights are indivisible and interdependent.

Case study

On 3 November 2003, hundreds of homeless families occupied the Prestes Maia building - a 22-storey abandoned clothes factory in downtown São Paulo.

Working with a local NGO, the Movimento dos Sem-Teto do Centro (MSTC), Homeless Movement of Central São Paulo, they transformed the vacant building from a haven for crime to a home and cultural centre.

The local government tried on several occasions to secure the eviction of the families, without assurances of adequate alternatives for those to be evicted. Amnesty International members from around the world wrote to express their concern and lawyers from the homeless movement managed to stave off several eviction orders in the courts.

In February 2007 the municipal government signed an agreement with the residents which provided some with homes and others with rent assistance while homes were found.

Community leader Jomarina, thanked Amnesty International on behalf of the Prestes Maia families: “We were not expecting this victory, but Amnesty International’s involvement suddenly gave the campaign visibility.”

Manoel Del Rio, a lawyer working with the MSTC. “Housing is a base from which people can begin to fight for other rights. The homeless movement had been neglected by human rights groups. Amnesty International gave the right to housing credibility as a human rights issue. The struggle continues even stronger today.”

In 2009 Amnesty International launches a global campaign – Campaign for Human Dignity – seeking to stop and prevent the human rights abuses that drive and deepen poverty.

The campaign will call for accountability of those responsible, respect for the active participation of people living in poverty (for their power over their own lives) and for equal access to rights for all.