Core reading

Maurice Cranston, What are Human Rights? (London: Bodley Head, 1973), ‘Economic and Social Rights’, 65-71.

Aryeh Neier, Taking Liberties: Four Decades in the Struggle for Human Rights (New York: 2003), xxix-xxxii.

Daniel J. Whelan and Jack Donnelly, ‘The West, Economic and Social Rights and the Global Human Rights Regime: Setting the Record Straight’, Human Rights Quarterly 29: 4 (2007), 908-949. See also the debate that this essay generated in Kang and Kirkup/Evans below.

Shedrack C. Agbakwa, ‘Reclaiming Humanity: Economic, Social and Cultural Rights as the Cornerstone of African Human Rights’, Yale Human Rights and Development Law Journal, vol. 5 (2002), 177-216.

Peter Slezkine, 'From Helsinki to Human Rights Watch: How an American Cold War Monitoring Group Became an international Human Rights Institution', Humanity Journal (winter 2014)

Paul O'Connell, 'The Death of Socio-economic Rights', The Modern Law Review 74(4) (2011), 532-554.

Further reading

Daniel J. Whelan, Indivisible Human Rights – A History (Univ. of Pennsylvania, 2010).

Mashood Baderin and Robert McCorquodale (eds.), Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in Action (Oxford: OUP, 2007).

Matthew Craven, The International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights: A Perspective on Its Development (Oxford, 1995).

Susan L. Kang, ‘The Unsettled Relationship of Economic and Social Rights and the West: A Response to Whelan and Donnelly’, Human Rights Quarterly 31: 4 (2009), 1006-1029.

Alex Kirkup and Tony Evans, ‘The Myth of Western Opposition to Economic, Social and Cultural Rights? A Reply to Whelan and Donnelly’, Human Rights Quarterly 31: 2 (2009).

Arthur Paige, ‘How “Transitions” Reshaped Human Rights: A Conceptual History of Transitional Justice’, Human Rights Quarterly 31:2 (2009), 321-367.

Philip Alston and Gerard Quinn, ‘The Nature and Scope of States Parties' Obligations under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights’, Human Rights Quarterly 9: 2 (1987), 156-229.

M. Magdalena Sepúlveda, The Nature of the Obligations under the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (Antwerp, 2003).

Cheryl B. Welch, ‘Liberalism and Social Rights’ in Murray Milgate and Cheryl B. Welch (eds.), Critical Issues in Social Thought (London, 1989).

Primary

Thomas Paine, Agrarian Justice, opposed to agrarian law, and to agrarian monopoly. Being a plan for ameliorating the condition of man (London, 1797). [electronic: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Agrarian_Justice]