Social and Economic Rights in the Caribbean

Abstract

Abstract This chapter examines socio-economic rights within the Commonwealth Caribbean by addressing a number of substantive issues- covering the range of doctrinal and socio-legal areas of inquiry. Firstly, the chapter addresses what is the substance of constitutional protection of socio-economic rights within the Commonwealth Caribbean by addressing the individual rights which receive constitutional protection throughout the region and the judicial interpretation afforded to these rights within Commonwealth Caribbean jurisprudence. This chapter will also look at the relationship between international law and domestic law in the enforceability and enforcement of socio-economic rights. The inter-relationship between international law and the protection or lack thereof of socio-economic rights within Commonwealth Caribbean legal and political thought is critically important in the absence of justiciable rights within the core of the Constitution. The chapter will then address the relationship between civil and political rights and socio-economic rights within the Caribbean constitutional milieu. The chapter will examine the approaches to civil and political, and the creative judicial approaches which have emerged regarding the indivisibility of socio-economic and civil and political rights and notions of implied enforceability will be examined. Finally, it will consider what are the judicial approaches which have emerged in Commonwealth Caribbean Constitutional interpretation; and what are the possibilities for the future. The chapter also examines the judicial approaches which have been gleaned from Caribbean Jurisprudence and the limitations such approaches may beget within the context of economic austerity and slow growth which has marked the Caribbean’s economic landscape.