Human Rights and Economic Reform

Co-editor Cynthia Soohoo, just returned from Geneva, recommends an article in The Nation:  Economic Reform is a Human Right:

In a recent article in The Nation, Radhika Balakrishnan, Executive Director of the Center for Women’s Global Leadership at Rutgers and James Heintz, Associate Director, Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts illustrate how recognition of economic and social rights can have a profound impact on economic policy in the U.S.  In particular, they argue that economic and social rights can provide assessment tools and a blueprint for development of economic policies.

As she has in other work, Professor Balakrishnan focuses on the implications of the human rights baseline requirement “that the state should use the ‘maximum of its available resources’ to ensure the full realization of [ESC] rights,” observing that this has “enormous implications for how budgets are set and how public funds are used.” 

A more in-depth treatment of these issue appears in Economic Policy and Human Rights: Holding Governments to Account,  by Radhika Balakrishnan and Diane Elson (Zed Books 2011).