658 HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY Vol. 39 is twenty-seven times more likely to be undernourished.3 Overall, being born in Swaziland means she can expect to live thirty fewer years than if she was born in Switzerland, and the cause from which she will eventually die most likely could otherwise have been avoided.4 On witnessing the real life tragedy of those around the world living without shelter, without access to education, and at risk of early mortality, it might seem reasonable to say that a violation of human rights has occurred.5 But, while framing life and death tragedies within the notion of rights leads one to hope that some improvement to the ill-fated situation could be made, the mere labelling of unsatisfied social needs as a violation of human rights is unsatisfactory. Social rights are dependent on the availability of resources.6 And, given that the capacities of different countries vary in significant ways, the expectation that some countries have a duty to deliver the same standard of health, nutrition, education, and housing as others may be unrealistic, just as the Swaziland/Switzerland example illustrates. It is precisely this resource-dependency that is the core of these rights’ complexity. How can the content of social rights be determined if it is allowed to differ across resource contexts, and how then is it possible to ascertain violations of these rights if the content is not determinate? This is what I call the “maximum available resources dilemma.”7 The dilemma I describe speaks sympathetically to research by other scholars who argue that dealing with the resources issue to determine the content of social rights, and assessing where along the line between rights to everything and rights to nothing obligations lie, presents the biggest challenge to justifying, defining, and measuring compliance with social rights. For example, in On Human Rights, philosopher James Griffin makes the case that the condition of maximum available resources, interpreted as “‘available after proper allocation to other important social goals,’”8 gives 3. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations Statistics Division, Food Security Indicators, Prevalence of Undernourishment (2016). 4. World Health Organization, World Health Statistics 2012, 58 (2012). 5. The concept of “violation” is used here as a way of describing an unjustified breach of the right. It is not used to describe an infringement, i.e. a justified breach of the right. Implicit in the argument is the distinction between social rights and social needs and/ or interests. 6. International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, adopted 16 Dec. 1966, G.A. Res. 2200 (XXI), U.N. GAOR, 21st Sess., U.N. Doc. A/6316 (1966), 993 U.N.T.S. 3 (entered into force 3 Jan. 1976) [hereinafter ICESCR]. 7. The resources dilemma I describe is not the same as that described by John Tobin in his monograph on the right to health. The dilemma here is not one related to the allocation of macro and micro resources, i.e. how scarce resources are allocated between health versus other legitimate social, economic, and cultural needs and interests. Rather, it relates to the intractability of social rights as a direct result of differences in the availability of resources. John Tobin, The Right to Health in International Law 69–73, 196 (2012). 8. James Griffin, On Human Rights 100 (2008).