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Measuring Compliance
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secure the welfare basket: a duty with no immediacy, which reduces these
rights to mere rhetoric. But does conditionality have to equate to rightsweakness? In the case that the condition is resource-based, such a conclusion would perhaps only follow if it is assumed that there is no valid test for
determining whether available resources actually are sufficient for securing
the welfare basket. If that assumption were true, then the conclusion seems
quite reasonable; it would be very difficult, perhaps impossible, to adequately
ascertain violations of these rights. It could be argued, however, that such
an assumption might be misplaced.
Although conditionality may appear to imply that resources are always
insufficient to realize full attainment of the welfare basket, this may not
always be the auto-result if a valid test for assessing whether maximum available resources are sufficient or insufficient for achieving it can be specified.
The test would need to give precision to the concept of maximum available
resources rather than absolve this complex task to the notion of “progressive
realization.” It needs to be a test of “extent” and could, say, range from 0
(the welfare basket being perfectly unaffordable within the given resource
set) to 1 (the welfare basket being perfectly affordable). As such, the closer
the result is to 1, the less incomplete-attainment is justifiable by the condition of resource insufficiency. Indeed, whenever the result is equal to 1 any
instance of incomplete-attainment of the welfare basket cannot be justified,
which, therefore, would signal some kind of violation.
The obligation incumbent on duty-bearers to fulfill social rights does
not then, on this account, exist as an absolute immovable threshold across
resource contexts. Rather, duty-bearers have an immediate, unconditional
obligation to secure the maximum level of the welfare basket that is affordable and have a progressive obligation to fully secure it as soon as resources
are sufficient to do so. If the test is precise enough, conditionality need not
preclude the obligation from being a “strong”37 immediate one. In defining
social rights as rights to a basket of social welfare-type goods, the empirical
challenge that remains for dealing with the maximum resources dilemma is
then to operationalize maximum available resources so that it is possible to
distinguish between those deprivations below full attainment of the welfare
basket that exist as a result of factors beyond a duty-bearer’s control and
those in which the duty-bearer may be a contributing, if not causal, factor.
IV. OPERATIONALIZING MAXIMUM AVAILABLE RESOURCES
By now, it is clear that the obligation incumbent on each duty-bearer is determined with reference to its ability to fulfill a substantively defined basket
37. Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously 188 (1977).