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Article The Minimum Core of Economic and Social Rights: A Concept in Search of Content Katharine G. Young† I. INTRODUCTION............................................................................................................................ 113 A. The International Role .................................................................................................... 120 B. The Constitutional Predecessor and Its Potential .......................................................... 123 II. THE MINIMUM CORE AS NORMATIVE ESSENCE ........................................................................... 126 A. A Needs-Based Core: Life, Survival, and Basic Needs................................................... 128 B. A Value-Based Core: Dignity, Equality, and Freedom .................................................. 133 C. Questioning the Essence Approach ................................................................................ 138 III. THE MINIMUM CORE AS MINIMUM CONSENSUS .......................................................................... 140 A. The Core Consensus: A Positivist Inquiry ...................................................................... 142 B. Consensus as a Normative Concept: Sovereignty and Self-Government ....................... 144 C. The Limits of Consensus ................................................................................................. 147 IV. THE MINIMUM CORE AS MINIMUM OBLIGATION ......................................................................... 151 A. Supervising Core Obligations: From Typologies to Templates ..................................... 152 B. Enforcing Core Obligations: Justiciable Complaints..................................................... 158 C. Unraveling Cores: The Challenge of Polycentricity ...................................................... 163 V. THE CONTENT IN SEARCH OF A CONCEPT? .................................................................................. 164 A. Prescribing Content: Indicators and Benchmarks ......................................................... 164 B. Justifying Limits: The Move to Balancing ...................................................................... 167 C. Signaling Extraterritoriality: The Globalist Challenge.................................................. 170 D. Making Claims: A Word on Language ........................................................................... 172 VI. CONCLUSION................................................................................................................................ 174 I. INTRODUCTION The concept of the “minimum core”1 seeks to establish a minimum legal content for the notoriously indeterminate claims of economic and social rights. By recognizing the “minimum essential levels” of the rights to foo d, health, housing, and education, 2 it is a concept trimme d, honed, and shorn of deontological excess. It re flects a “minimalist” rights strategy, which implies † S.J.D. candidate and B yse Teaching Fellow, Harvard Law School. The author thanks Sandra Liebenberg, Frank Michelm an, Vlad Perju, Henry Steiner, and Mark Tushnet for helpful comments on a prior draft. Special thanks also to Ph ilip Alston for early prom pting. Different parts of this paper have also benefited fr om presentations to the Project on Justice, Welfare, and Economics at Harvard University, the Byse W orkshop at Harv ard Law School, and the Graduate W orkshop at Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics. All errors remain the author’s own. 1. See U.N. Econ. & Soc. Council [ECOSOC], Comm. on Econ., Soc. & Cultural Rights, Report on the Fifth S ession, Supp. No. 3 , Annex III, ¶ 10, U.N. Doc. E/1991/23 (1991) [hereinafter General Comment No. 3]. 2. Id.

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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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