For this reason, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights says States must achieve economic, social and cultural rights progressively. For example, your Government has to take steps to improve conditions in the area of health care, with a particular focus on providing health care to poor people or marginalized people with the aim of achieving universal access to health care as soon as possible. Sometimes, richer countries should help poorer countries and for this reason, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights includes an obligation of international cooperation.
The two Covenants and the International Bill of Human Rights are powerful statements of your rights and should persuade all Governments to respect your rights. For the two Covenants to become binding in your country on your Government must ratify them. This means your Government must expressly agreed to abide by them. Two committees of experts monitor the Covenants. Regular review by the Committees of progress reports submitted by countries. Evaluation of complaints by individuals who claim their rights have been violated.
For economic, social and cultural rights, in-country inquiries in cases of very serious violations of these rights. Thanks to the Covenants, countries have changed their laws and policies and the lives of many people around the world have improved. Some examples of impact include:. Argentina paid compensation and a monthly pension to an indigenous girl who had been brutally raped. Argentina also introduced compulsory gender training for public officials because of the case.
Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and the Philippines abolished the death penalty. Germany changed its asylum procedures after a request made by the Human Rights Committee. Kyrgyzstan introduced habeas corpus protections in its Criminal Code.
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Sign me up for the United for Human Rights newsletter. Countries were willing to proclaim these rights as long as this proclamation did not entail strong accountability mechanisms.
The second difference between the two treaties refers to the clarity and burden of words. Yet the same article in the ICESCR uses much more cryptic language about how the compliance of states to the treaty on economic, social and cultural rights will be monitored.
It states :. Each state party to the present covenant undertakes to take steps, individually and through international assistance and co-operation, especially economic and technical, to the maximum of its available resources, with a view to achieving progressively the full realisation of the rights recognised in the present covenant by all appropriate means, including particularly the adoption of legislative measures.
There are also differences in the ways states who violate these two sets of rights are held to account. A complaint can lead to detailed recommendations on the specific case which countries are expected to implement. To date, countries have let their citizens complain to the UN like this, but the UK is not one of them.
But when it came to economic, social and cultural rights, the ICESCR did not contain anything similar, and this was only partly corrected in when the UN created a body to periodically assess the general level of enjoyment of these rights in those countries which have ratified the treaty.
All this means that there are three degrees of separation between the two sets of rights: different treaties that states could pick and choose from, different legal wording, and different accountability mechanisms. Something similar happened in the European context.
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