156 THE YALE JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL LAW [Vol. 33: 113 evidence, addressing the healt h concerns of the whole population.” 244 It is difficult to determine whether the Comm ittee designated these obligations as core because of t heir immediate practicability or their grea ter moral salience; on both grounds, the core obliga tions are subject to criticism. 245 The Committee’s response to the practicability of the core obligations (and by implication, their affordability) is to posit a duty of assistance and cooperation on both state parties and non-state actors who are “in a position to assist.”246 In its latest General Comments, the Committee has once again shifted its articulation of core obligations. Although they follow the same template, core obligations are now more general. Thus, for example, a recent General Comment, published in 2005 i n relation to the right to work, suggests that “core obligations” relate mainly to duties of nondiscrimination. 247 The substance of these “core obligations ” contains little overlap with the normatively prioritized principles of the right to work in other (specialized) treaties. Two different sorts of explanation account for the C ommittee’s diverging methodology with re spect to core obligations . The first is the most obvious. It suggests that the Committee issues comments on different rights in the Covenant and finds it appropriate to adapt its orientation to the unique obligations raised by each right . For example, the right to health raises more complex issues of priorities, duties, an d supervision than do the rights to food and water.248 The right to work, to o, entails unique hist orical and ideological challenges by virtue of its more exp licit incompatibility w ith capitalist labor markets and global economic integration. 249 At base, this explanation grasps that all economic and so cial rights ar e not created equal and that the Committee’s modifications of “core obl igations” respect this difference. Nonetheless, it fails to account for th e timing of the Comm ittee’s shifts, and the fact that rights which raise similar distributional questions and challenges—such as food and water—ar e assigned very different core obligations. The second explanation for the Committee’s shift follows a more expansive view of its efforts within the international treaty system. It registers the pressures on th e Committee to operate meaningf ully with respect to the Covenant while not impacting other substantive treaty regimes. On t his view, 244. Id. ¶ 43(f) (setting out a partic ipatory process and a refe rence to indicators and benchmarks to give content to the process). 245. Karrisha Pillay, South Africa’s Commitment to Health Rights in th e Spotlight: Do We Meet the International Standard? , in EXPLORING THE CORE CONTENT, supra note 7, at 61, 66-68 (recommending that South Africa’s healthcare priorities not be set by General Comme nt No. 14 because of its f ailure to includ e an obliga tion to m eet the challenge of the HIV/ AIDS pandemic as core); Benjamin Mason Meier, Employing Health Rights for Global Justi ce: The Promise of Public Health in Response to the Insalubrious Ramifications of Globalization , 39 C ORNELL INT'L L.J. 711, 735-36 (2006) (suggesting that the essential drugs goal can be met by few states). 246. General Comment No. 15, supra note 17, ¶ 38 (“particularly incumbent on States parties . . . and other actors in a position to assist”); General Comment No. 14, supra note 10, ¶ 45. 247. General Comment No. 18, supra note 17, ¶ 31. 248. E.g., BILCHITZ, supra note 9, at 220-25 (proposing a pplication of an additional “pragmatic” minimum core for the right to healthcare, as opposed to a more prin cipled approach to the minimum core specified for food, water, and shelter). 249. Richard Lewis Siegel, The Right to Work: Core Minimum Obligations , in CORE OBLIGATIONS, supra note 225, at 21, 24-26.