ABSTRACT
Over the course of history a diverse array of thinkers such as John Locke, Mary Wollstonecraft, Karl Marx, Martin Luther King, Jr., Amartya Sen, and Pope John Paul II have argued for the existence and fulfi llment of economic rights. In addition, myriad public advocates, politicians, and practitioners have promoted the right to work, education, health care, housing, clean and sanitary living conditions, and other economic rights. Among them are Franklin Delano and Eleanor Roosevelt, Bangladeshi microlending pioneer Muhammad Yunus, musical luminaries Shakira and Bono, physician-activist Paul Farmer, and Iranian Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi. Contemporary leaders from across the globe, such as China’s Hu Jintao, Liberia’s Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and US President Barack Obama have expressed their commitment to many economic rights. In 1948 the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (hereafter UDHR) offi cially recognized economic rights as equally legitimate to social, cultural, civil and political rights. In 1966, the UN Declaration sought to make these rights legally binding obligations in the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (hereafter ICESCR), which was created separately from the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (hereafter ICCPR). Among the economic rights enumerated in the UDHR and ICESCR are the right to an adequate standard of living, to suffi cient nutrition, to work, the right to a fair wage, the right to unionize, to rest and leisure, to participation in cultural life, the right to health care, to social security, and the right to education.
