When it entered the scene in 1987, the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights was acutely aware of the need to provide guidance to States as to how they should go about discharging their obligation to "progressively realize" the rights of the Covenant. The conventional wisdom of the time, reflected in the choice to adopt two separate covenants rather than one single binding instrument implementing the promises of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, was that economic, social and cultural rights were too vague and ill-defined to be justiciable, and that neither independant experts nor courts were in a position to assess whether the efforts of States were sufficient to comply with that obligation. It was stated by a law and development scholar writing in 1984 that though the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights "speaks in the language of rights, [it] refers to the realities of programs".12 Brownlie, a leading international law publicist, described the Covenant as "programmatic and promotional" in the third edition of his Principles of Public International Law, published in 1979.13 Jurists such as the Belgian Mark Bossuyt or the Dutch E.W. Vierdag voiced their scepticism as regards the ability of courts to supervise compliance with economic, social and cultural rights, which they saw as of a fundamentally distinct nature than civil and political rights.14 Sensing the danger, progressive academics and non-governmental organisations sought to clarify the nature of States parties' obligations under the Covenant in order to ensure that the work of the Committee would be based on solid ground. An expert meeting convened in Maastricht on 2-6 June 1986 provided the opportunity to further advance the understanding of the legal significance of economic, social and cultural rights, beyond the right to food on which most efforts had been converging until then.15 The timing was propitious: it was held after the members of the Committee had been appointed (and four of them were present in Maastricht), but before they held their first session, and at a time when, although the significance of the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights was clearly recognized, it listed rights that were still largely underexplored by human rights scholars and underenforced by courts. The Limburg Principles that were adopted at the Maastricht meeting marked an important advance in the understanding of economic, social and cultural rights, and their influence further increased after they were officially transmitted to the Commission on Human Rights at the request of the Netherlands.16 More or less simultaneously, Philip Alston, a Committee member who was to become its first rapporteur, published an important paper identifying the challenges facing the new committee established by the Economic and Social Council to examine the reports submitted by States parties to the Covenant.17 In a contribution written jointly with Gerard Quinn which provides the most extensive analysis of the understanding of States' obligations having guided the drafters of the Covenant, even he had to concede, however, that precise benchmarks to assess budgetary efforts by the States were lacking, so that a procedural approach might ultimately be more appropriate: It is the state of a country's economy that most vitally determines the level of its obligations as they relate to any of the enumerated rights under the Covenant. From an evaluation of these circumstances flows a picture of a state's abilities and from this may be determined the thresholds it must meet in discharging its obligations. In ascertaining the quantum of resources to be set aside to promote realization of the rights, the state is of course entitled to a wide 12 David Trubek, "Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in the Third World: Human Rights Law and Human Needs Programs", in Theodor Meron (ed), Human Rights in International Law: Legal and Policy Issues (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984): 205-271, at 231. 13 Ian Brownlie, Principles of Public International Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), at 572-573. 14 Mark Bossuyt, "La distinction juridique entre les droits civils et politiques et les droits économiques, sociaux et culturels", Revue des droits de l'homme, vol. 9 (1978): 69; E.W. Vierdag, ‘The Legal Nature of the Rights Granted by the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights’, Netherlands Yearbook of International Law, vol. 9 (1978): 69-105. There were exceptions, of course: G.J.H. van Hoof, "The Legal Nature of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights: a Rebuttal of Some Traditional Views", in Philip Alston and Katarina Tomaševski (eds), The Right to Food (Netherlands Institute of Human Rights (SIM), Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publ., 1984): 97-110. 15 The expert meeting was convened at the invitation of the International Commission of Jurists, the Urban Morgan Institute on Human Rights and the Centre for Human Rights of the Faculty of Law of Maastricht University. 16 See UN document E/CN.4/1987/17. 17 Philip Alston, "Out of the Abyss: The Challenges Confronting the New U.N. Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights", Human Rights Quarterly, vol. 9(1987): 332-381. 6