Introductory Note to the Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights

Abstract

On December 10, 2008, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), reproduced below, commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). In so doing, it rectified a three-decades-old asymmetry in international human rights law: the lack of an individual communications procedure for alleged violations of the ICESCR. This asymmetry, reflected in the establishment of an individual complaints procedure for the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and virtually every other United Nations human rights treaty adopted in the interim, traces back to an important U.N. General Assembly decision taken in 1952. Charged with drafting an International Bill of Rights, the U.N. Commission on Human Rights had by 1947 decided that the Bill would consist of a declaration, a convention, and measures of implementation. The first of those, the UDHR, was finalized and adopted on December 10, 1948. Predicated on an understanding that the ideal of human dignity could not be secured without equal attention to the full family of civil, cultural, economic, political and social rights, which could not be divided or considered in isolation from each other, it comprised in