120 THE YALE JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL LAW [Vol. 33: 113 particularly salient for wo men in the private sphere. 30 From a different perspective, individual cultural rights, which may also s ound in intellectual property rights, harm the material in terests of group populations unable to access the market.31 For these reasons, it is wort h separating the substantive analysis of cultural from e conomic and social rights, although the structural exploration may be similar. A. The International Role The Committee—the supervisory body responsible for clarifying the terms and implementation of the Covenant32—issued its General Comment on the minimum core at an auspicious moment: shortly after the 1989 collapse of the communist economies and shortly before those advocating neoliberal policies raced in to restructure them. Since then, the Committee has used the “minimum core” to give substance to the Covenant’s enumerated rights to food, health, housing, and education, 33 and the emerging right to water. 34 Commentators have proposed the minimum core as the conc ept to guide the interpretation of the economic and social rights protected in other international human rights instruments. 35 The Committee has also applied the minimum core, not only to its super vision of national syst ems of political economic organization, but also t o its supervision of states parties’ individual (and collective) activities in global trade, aid, development, and security regimes.36 Susan Moller Okin, Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? , in IS MULTICULTURALISM BAD Cohen, Matthew Howard & Martha Nussbaum eds., 1999). 31. Covenant, supra note 19, art 15(1)(c) recognizes the “right of everyone to benefit from the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.” But see General Comment No. 17, supra note 22, ¶¶ 1-3, for the Committee’s attempt to distingu ish human rights from intellectual property rights. This question is also raised by Margaret Chon in her article, Intellectual Property and the Development Divide , 27 CARDOZO L. REV. 2821, 2827-28 (2006). 32. The Committee, a group of independent expe rts operating under the mandate of the U.N. Economic and Social Council, was established in 1986, a decade after the Covenant entered into force. 33. See, e.g., General Comment No. 14 , supra note 10, ¶ 43; U.N. Econ. & Soc. Council [ECOSOC], Comm. on Econ., Soc. & Cultural Rights, General Comment No. 13: The Right to Education (art. 13), ¶ 57, U.N. Doc . E/C.12/1999/10 (Dec. 8, 1999) [he reinafter General Comment No. 13]; U.N. Econ. & S oc. Council [ECOSOC], Comm. on Econ., S oc. & Cultural R ights, General Comment No. 12: The R ight to Adequate Food (art. 11) , ¶ 8, U.N. Doc. E/C.12/1999/5 (May 12, 1999) [hereinafter General Comment No. 12 ]. The two general comm ents on the right to adequate housing have not nom inated a m inimum core, but th ese have been elabo rated elsewhere. See, e.g., U.N. Dev . Programme, UNDP Human Development Report 2000, Housing Rights, § 18 (Nov. 20, 1999), available at http://hdr.undp.org/en/reports/gloabl/HDR2000/papers/leckie.pdf [hereinafter UNDP 2000 Housing Rights]. 34. General Comment No. 15, supra note 17, ¶ 37. 35. See, e.g., Thomas Hammarberg, Children, in ECONOMIC, SOCIAL AND CULTURAL RIGHTS, supra note 4, at 353, 366-67 (suggesting that a m inimum core obligation is useful for ordering the priorities of poor countries with respect to the rights of children under th e Convention on the Rights of the Child, despite the different articulation of obliga tions in the Convention on the Rights of the Child). TARA MELISH, PROTECTING ECONOMIC, SOCIAL AND CULTURAL RIGHTS IN TH E INTER-AMERICAN HUMAN RIGHTS SYSTEM: A MANUAL ON PRESENTING CLAIMS 170-71 (2002) (discussing the usefulness of the minimum core concept for the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights). 36. U.N. Econ. & Soc. Council [ECOSOC], Comm. on Ec on., Soc. & Cultural Rights, General Comment No. 8: The Relationship Betw een Economic Sanctions and Respect for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights , ¶ 7, U.N. Doc. E/C.12/1997/8 (Dec. 12, 1997) [hereinafter General Comment No. 8] (asserting that “the State and the internat ional community itself [must] do everything possible to protect at least the co re content of the econom ic, social and cultural rights of the affected 30. FOR WOMEN 7, 9 (Joshua