Drawing from a comprehensive review of legal instruments, practice, jurisprudence and literature, and using a multidisciplinary approach, this unique book brings forth the full spectrum of cultural rights, as individual and collective human rights, and offers a compelling vision for public policy.

Challenging questions arise in the effort to adequately protect the cultural rights of individuals and communities worldwide, not the least of which are questions concerning the very understanding of ‘culture’. In Cultural Rights in International Law and Discourse: Contemporary Challenges and Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Pok Yin S. Chow offers an account of the present-day challenges to the articulation and implementation of cultural rights in international law. Through examining how ‘culture’ is conceptualised in different stages of contemporary anthropology, the book explores how these understandings of ‘culture’ enable us to more accurately put issues of cultural rights into perspective. The book attempts to provide analytical exits to existing conundrums and dilemmas concerning the protections of culture, cultural heritage and cultural identity.

Collective cultural rights are commonly perceived as the most neglected or least developed category of human rights. Cultural Rights as Collective Rights – An International Law Perspective endeavours to challenge this view and offers a comprehensive, critical analysis of recent developments in distinct areas of international law and jurisprudence, from every region of the world, in relation to the scope, legal content, and enforceability of such rights. Leading international scholars explore the conceptualisation and operationalisation of collective cultural rights as human rights, encompassing community rights, and discuss the ways in which such rights may collide with other, mostly individual, human rights. As such, Cultural Rights as Collective Rights – An International Law Perspective offers a cross-cutting and original overview on how the protection, recognition and enforcement of collective cultural rights affect the development, changes and formation of general international law norms.

Since the first edition (published in 2009), there have been several important treaty developments, including the entry into force of the Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) on individual communications, and significant developments in the case law on economic, social and cultural (ESC) rights. The second edition addresses these developments and explores ESC rights from foundational issues to substantive rights and systems of protection. It has been fully updated to include new material and up-to-date coverage of the case law of human rights bodies and national courts on ESC rights. In addition to the rights to health, education and work covered in the first edition, the second edition analyses new developments, such as the rights to adequate food, water and sanitation, adequate housing, social security and cultural rights. It also considers several contemporary issues including the extraterritorial human rights obligations of states in the area of economic, social and cultural rights; non-state actors; relationship of the ICESCR to other areas of international law; the Optional Protocol to the ICESCR; regional protection of ESC rights; more examples of the domestic protection of ESC rights; the protection of ESC rights of vulnerable groups; contemporary challenges to ESC rights, including poverty, corruption, armed conflicts and terrorism. It concludes by exploring the possible establishment of a World Court of Human Rights.

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.

Evelyne Schmid demonstrates how violations of economic, social and cultural rights can overlap with international crimes.

This book addresses the international legal obligation to protect economic, social, and cultural human rights in times of armed conflict and other situations of armed violence. These rights provide guarantees to individuals of their fundamental rights to work, to an adequate standard of living (food, water, housing), to education, and to health. Armed violence can take many forms, from civil unrest or protest and other forms of internal disturbances and tensions to higher levels of violence that may amount to armed conflict, whether of an international or of a non-international character. However, in all such cases the protection of ESC rights is sorely challenged. Situations of actual or potential violence present a number of challenges to the application and implementation of human rights law in general and socio-economic rights obligations more specifically. This book sets out the legal framework, defining what constitutes a minimum universal standard of human rights protection applicable in all circumstances. It assesses the concept and content of ESC rights' obligations, and evaluates how far they can be legally applicable in various scenarios of armed violence. By looking at the specific human rights treaty provisions, it discusses how far ESC rights obligations can be affected by practical and legal challenges to their implementation. The book addresses the key issues facing the protection of such rights in times of armed conflict: the legal conditions to limit ESC rights on security grounds, including the use of force; the extraterritorial applicability of international human rights treaties setting out ESC rights; the relationship between human rights law and international humanitarian law; and the obligations of non-state actors under human rights law and with particular relevance to the protection of ESC rights. The book assesses the nature of these potential challenges to the protection of ESC rights, and offers solutions to reinforce their continued application.