2008] The Minimum Core of Economic and Social Rights 157 core obligations allow the Committee to claim its own jurisdictional turf. This might explain why the cor e obligations that are supposed to flow from the right to work share little with the fu ndamental labor righ ts—against child labor and forced labor—which figure in the conventions of the International Labour Organization. 250 Moreover, this explanation aligns with a more general trend that has resulted from the expansion of international treaties. For example, José Alvarez ha s identified the impetu s of controlling “mission creep” and overlapping “regime complexes” in international law: [W]hen an [international organization] . . . becomes such an effective treaty machine that states can no longer keep up with their resp ective reporting obligations, it is natural that the organization itself would need to enuncia te the ‘core’ obligations expected of all members, even though no such setting of pr iorities is explicitly authorized by its 251 constitutive instrument . . . . Adopting a more critical frame towards the process of “f ragmentation” in international law, Martti Koskenniemi suggests that the speci alizations of “trade law” and “human rights” law h ave begun to reverse established legal hierarchies by giving greater credence to the structural bias within the relevant functional expertise.252 This explains the different substance and greater legal priority of core obligations emanating from the international trade regime and the international la bor regime over the regime of human ri ghts. If we appl y this account to the Comm ittee’s work, we can pred ict a reversal in the normative prioritization behind core obligations, as the Committee negotiates its own agenda in relation to organizations established under the enforceable trade, development, and labor regi mes. The incentive on the Committee to avoid, or at leas t control, areas of overlap subverts both the Consensus Approach and the Essence Approach, l eaving “core obligations” a substitute term for the Committee’s (circumvented) authority. This explanation predicts that core obligations will become na rrower and ultimately compromised by the strength of the other substantive regimes. Before addressing this issue more fully below, I tu rn to a ra ther different recommende d content for core obligations: the aspect of the mini mum core which gives rise to justiciable complaints. This takes us outside of the supervisory competence of the Committee to the adjudicatory competence of both national and supranational courts and tribunals. 250. There are important differences between the “core rights” of the ILO and the right to work in Article 6 of the Covenant. E.g., Philip Alston, ‘Core Labour Standards’ and the Transformation of the International Labour Rights R egime, 15 E UR. J. INT’L L. 457 (2004) (exam ining the implications of the core rights jurisprudence of th e ILO); cf. Brian Langille, Core Labour Rights—The True Story (Reply to Alston), 16 E URO. J. INT’L L. 409 (2005). The em phasis on “core obligations,” however, does not reflect these differences and areas of possible overlap. 251. José E. Alvarez, International Organizations: Then and Now, 100 AM. J. INT’L L. 324, 327 (2006) (referring to the core obligations under the ILO); see also Dinah Shelton, Normative Hierarchy in International Law, 100 AM. J. INT’L L. 291 (2006) (exam ining conflicting human rights norm s in multiple international treaties and institutions). 252. Koskenniemi, supra note 183, at 4; see also U.N. Int’l Law Co mm’n, Fragmentation of International Law: Difficulties Aris ing from th e Diversification and Expansion of International Law , U.N. Doc. A/CN.4/L.682 (Apr. 13, 2006) (prepared by Martti Koskenniemi).