2008] The Minimum Core of Economic and Social Rights 165 content of economic and social rights in both international and constitutional fields, facilitating the operation of the “p rogressive . . . realization” obligation attached to each r ight,294 the effect of limitations, 295 and the reversal of the burden of proof to the state which is not provid ing a minimum degree of material protection. The Obligations Appr oach runs closest to this vision, by focusing on the duties that flow fro m each right, but it ultimately comes undone by its inability to account for th e multiple obligations that necessarily correlate to each right. I argue that instead of demarcating different rights and obligations as “core” and “non- core,” the Committee and the court s are better equipped t o supervise and enforce the (predominantl y) positive obligations attached to economic and social ri ghts by using indi cators and benchmarks and the (predominantly) negative obligations by an assessment of state responsibility and causality.296 Indicators usually refer to a set of statistics which “indicate” phenomena that are not directly me asurable and may be based on either quantitative or qualitative information, as long as it can be consistently measured over time.297 Indicators may i nvite crossnational comparisons but may also take a deliberately self-referential character. 298 Benchmarks are goals or targets set according to the di ffering situations of each country and are sometimes referred to as “mi nimum thresholds.”299 Thus, in an important respect, they do not “rank” rights so much as prior itize different temporal targets for an evolving rights protection to meet. Attention to indicators and benchmarks is not new. Indeed, bot h are central to the Committee’s practice. Through a practice of “scoping”—which involves both the state under re view and the Comm ittee—the Committee designates adjustable targets for eac h state party to ac hieve by the next reporting period.300 Importantly, the level of economic resources within a state is not the only factor releva nt to setting the benchmark. 301 Like the parallel 294. S. AFR. CONST. 1996 ss. 26-27; Covenant, supra note 19, art. 2(1). Sections 26 (housing) and 27 (healthcare, food, water, and social security) both stipulate the right in S ubsection 1, and set out its implementation in Subsection 2, with the follo wing provision: “T he state m ust take reasonable legislative and other m easures, within its available resources, to achie ve the progressive realisation of this right.” S. AFR. CONST. 1996 ss. 26-27. 295. S. AFR. CONST. 1996 s. 36; see also S. AFR. CONST. 1996 s. 7(3) (identif ying the rights in the Bill of Rights as subject to constitutional limitation); Iles, supra note 40, at 452, 455-63 (investigating the relationship between Section 36 and the “internal limitations” clauses of the economic and social rights provisions—that is, sections 26(2) and 27(2), which reduce the am bit of sections 26(1) and 27(1) respectively); supra note 60 and accompanying text (pointi ng out the historical links between the core concept and limitations in German constitutional law). 296. An example of this type of analysis is undertaken in General Comment No. 7 on forced evictions. U.N. Econ. & Soc. Council [ECOSO C], Comm. on Econ., Soc. & Cultural Rights, Report on the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Sessions, supp. 2, Annex IV, U.N. Doc. E/1998/2 (1998). 297. For an attempt to distill a single definition of “indicators,” see Maria Green, What We Talk About When We Talk A bout Indicators: Current Approaches to Human Rights Measurement , 23 H UM. RTS. Q. 1062, 1076-77 (2001). 298. Katarina Tomaševski, Indicators, in ECONOMIC, SOCIAL AND CULTURAL RIGHTS, supra note 4, at 531, 542. 299. Green, supra note 297, at 1080. 300. E.g., General Comment No. 15, supra note 17, ¶ 54; General Comment No. 14, supra note 10, ¶ 58; Riedel, supra note 176, at 356. Eibe Riedel has been a member of the Committee since 1997. 301. See Alicia Ely Yamin, Reflections on Defining, Understanding and Measuring Poverty in Terms of Violations of Economic and Social Rights Under International Law , 4 GEO. J. ON FIGHTING POVERTY 273, 300 (1997) for a critique of Robert Robertson, Measuring State Compliance with the