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The United States, despite being among the world’s wealthiest and most resource and technology-heavy states, remains the only developed country where millions go hungry (“The State of Hunger in 2009,” Human Rights, 2009).

The enforcement of economic rights is instrumental to the amelioration of the ubiquitous and damaging economic crises domestically and abroad.Įconomic Justice to Combat Economic StrifeĬonstitutionalizing economic rights can begin to ameliorate the gaping issues of hunger, unemployment, and poverty that disproportionately affect low-income and minority communities in the United States and abroad. These include providing freedoms, imposing obligations on the state regarding third parties, and imposing obligations on the state to adopt measures or to achieve a particular result (International Commission of Jurists, 2008). The obligations imposed by economic rights work must be approached in the same way as they are with respect to civil and political rights. Today, economic rights are not deemed officially “justiciable,” meaning there remains significant controversy surrounding whether or not independent judiciaries should remedy a violation of the right through deeming government action or inaction unconstitutional and, to a certain extent, demanding legislative or executive response. This contrasts “first-generation” civil-political rights, which largely limit government interference, and which many claim are compromised at the expense of socioeconomic rights. Social rights are primarily private rights requiring government intervention and sacrifice, rather than a negative right that implicates government inaction. They are regarded as “second-generation” rights protected by the government to ensure the fulfillment of basic needs like sustenance, housing, education, health, and employment. More specifically, social rights often deal with the allocation and distribution of resources, a power generally reserved for the legislature. Human rights scholars recognize five broad categories of rights-civil, political, social, economic, and cultural-outlined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but rarely practiced in their totality. This interpretation is, at times, subjectively operationalized. While international human rights law emboldens the fiduciary responsibilities of national governments to protect the human rights of their residents, the universality of human rights also engenders a broad interpretation of how they can be observed. Thus, the universal obligation to adhere to these rights arguably binds the government to be proactive in its action or inaction toward fostering human dignity. By definition, human rights are universal and describe those rights related to human dignity.