Children’s Economic and Social Rights

Abstract

Recent years have seen a growing understanding of the relationship between poverty and human rights, an explosion in awareness of the status of children as right-holders, and increasing linkages being made between human rights and child poverty in the development context. Galvanized by mounting concerns about the impacts of economic globalization and the 2007–2008 financial and economic crises on children, these developments have unsurprisingly focused academic and practitioner attention on those rights of children that are most directly related to ensuring children’s survival and development needs – namely, children’s economic and social rights (ESR). This chapter focuses on the content of, and obligations imposed by, children’s ESR. It opens by locating ESR under the CRC in terms of the broader international human rights framework on ESR. It then goes on to discuss the duties of States and other actors in terms of those rights, focusing in particular on Article 4 CRC. In doing so, it concentrates in particular on the interaction between the work of the Committee and that of the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. The chapter concludes with a discussion of what lies ahead for children’s ESR, highlighting crucial challenges, including law’s persistent relative neglect of child ESR, the potential impact of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, and the ongoing marginalization of children within global society.