Captures significant transformations in the theory and practice of economic and social rights in constitutional and human rights law.

This book sets out to assess the role and impact of socio-economic strategies used by civil society actors in South Africa. Focusing on a range of socio-economic rights and national trends in law and political economy, the book's authors show how socio-economic rights have influenced the development of civil society discourse and action.

Drawing on a wide range of interdisciplinary resources, this scholarly work provides an in-depth and thorough analysis of the socio-economic rights jurisprudence of the newly democratic South Africa. The book explores how the judicial interpretation and enforcement of socio-economic rights can be more responsive to the conditions of systemic poverty and inequality characterising South African society. Based on meticulous research, the work marries legal analysis with perspectives from political philosophy and democratic theory.

Since World War II, a growing number of jurisdictions in both the developing and industrialized worlds have adopted progressive constitutions that guarantee social and economic rights (SER) in addition to political and civil rights. Parallel developments have occurred at transnational level with the adoption of treaties that commit signatory states to respect and fulfil SER for their peoples. This book is a product of the International Social and Economic Rights Project (iSERP), a global consortium of judges, lawyers, human rights advocates, and legal academics who critically examine the effectiveness of SER law in promoting real change in people’s lives. The book addresses a range of practical, political, and legal questions under these headings, with acute sensitivity to the racial, cultural, and gender implications of SER and the path-breaking SER jurisprudence now emerging in the "Global South". The book brings together internationally renowned experts in the field of social and economic rights to discuss a range of rights controversies from both theoretical and practical perspectives. Contributors of the book consider specific issues in the litigation and adjudication of SER cases from the differing standpoints of activists, lawyers, and adjudicators in order to identify and address the specific challenges facing the SER community. This book will be of great use and interest to students and scholars of comparative constitutional law, human rights, public international law, development studies, and democratic political theory.

There is a clear overlap between securing socio-economic human rights for all persons and arranging adequate access to essential public services across society. Both are necessary to realise thriving, inclusive societies, with adequate living standards for all, based on human dignity. This edited volume brings together the two topics for the first time. In particular, it identifies the common challenges for essential public services provision and socio-economic human rights realisation, and it explores how socio-economic rights law can be harnessed to reinforce better access to services. An important aim of this book is to understand how international socio-economic human rights law and guideposts can be used and strengthened to improve access to services, and assess socio-economic legal and policy decisions. The volume includes contributions from different continents, on a range of different services, and engages with the realities of different regulatory settings. After an introduction that sets out the most important challenges for universal access to services – including sufficient resources mobilisation, private actor involvement and regulation, or the need for improved checks and balances – the book goes on to discuss current issues in services provision and socio-economic rights, as well as explores the place and role of private business actors in the provision of services. In particular, it assesses how the responsibility and accountability of such actors for human rights can be improved . The final part of the book narrows in on the under-explored human rights concepts of ‘participation’ and ‘accountability’, as essential prerequisites for better ‘checks and balances’. Overall, this volume presents a unique and powerful illustration of how socio-economic human rights law supports improved access to essential public services for all.

Core Socio-Economic Rights and the European Court of Human Rights focuses on socio-economic rights in the context of the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) and, through review and exploration of core socio-economic protection and rights, offers suggestions for improving the ECtHR's reasoning in socio-economic cases.

This pioneering volume explores the long-neglected history of social rights, from the Middle Ages to the present. It debunks the myth that social rights are 'second-generation rights' – rights that appeared after World War II as additions to a rights corpus stretching back to the Enlightenment. Not only do social rights stretch back that far; they arguably pre-date the Enlightenment. In tracing their long history across various global contexts, this volume reveals how debates over social rights have often turned on deeper struggles over social obligation – over determining who owes what to whom, morally and legally. In the modern period, these struggles have been intertwined with questions of freedom, democracy, equality and dignity. Many factors have shaped the history of social rights, from class, gender and race to religion, empire and capitalism. With incomparable chronological depth, geographical breadth and conceptual nuance, Social Rights and the Politics of Obligation in History sets an agenda for future histories of human rights.