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Boston College Law School Digital Commons @ Boston College Law School Boston College Law School Faculty Papers January 2008 The Minimum Core of Economic and Social Rights: A Concept in Search of Content Katharine G. Young Boston College Law School, katharine.young.3@bc.edu Follow this and additional works at: http://lawdigitalcommons.bc.edu/lsfp Part of the Human Rights Law Commons Recommended Citation Katharine G. Young. "The Minimum Core of Economic and Social Rights: A Concept in Search of Content." Yale International Law Journal 33, (2008): 113-175. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Digital Commons @ Boston College Law School. It has been accepted for inclusion in Boston College Law School Faculty Papers by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ Boston College Law School. For more information, please contact nick.szydlowski@bc.edu.

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The Minimum Core of Economic and Social Rights: A Concept in Search of Content

Articles and Commentary

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Authors: Katharine G. Young

Rights Involved

Right to adequate housing
Right to education
Right to food
Right to health
Right to life
Right to work

Issue

Accountability
Extraterritorial obligations
Minimum core obligations
Non-retrogression
Participation
Progressive realization
Resource generation

Year: 2008

Summary: Argues that the rejection of the minimum core concept, or its alternate embrace, is available only on the basis of a clearer analysis of its interpretation. Without this clarity, the concept cannot supply a predetermined content to ESCR, rank the value of particular claims, or set the level and criteria of state justification required for a permissible infringement. Argues that it is unlikely that the concept will ever offer the relative determinacy required for these three tests. Yet it can assist as an object of interpretive agreement—or disagreement—around claims for socioeconomic protection. Argues for the discard of the goals of fixture, closure, and determinacy structured into the concept by its advocates. By searching not for content to the minimum core concept, but rather for new concepts to facilitate the rights’ “content,” operating as law. Examines whether the supervisory and enforcement work can be deferred to benchmarks and indicators, much of the obligations analysis to the assessment of causality and responsibility, and much of the normative and political work to more open expressions of economic and social rights. One consequence of this approach is to transfer the ambitions for the minimum core concept into other areas, which are briefly discussed. A second consequence is the departure from the analytic science of stipulating core and non-core needs along a discourse of rights. Concludes that if there is any work left for the minimum core, it may only be in its potential—not yet assessed—to register the claims for recognition of material disadvantage from previously obscured claimant groups.

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