Socio-economic Human Rights Research Articles

Responsibility Incorporated

Responsibility Incorporated

The main challenges.

The last few decades have witnessed dramatic changes, not only in health, but also in all aspects of human life. From the social point of view, the individual and family are again becoming the focus of attention, and there is an increasing concern about socio-economic conditions and human rights. From the health point of view, morbidity and mortality patterns are changing and many people live longer and fewer people die. The reasons behind these changes are mainly the expansion in knowledge and technology and the concern about our lifestyles. These changes impact heavily on both medical education, the delivery of health services, and the cost of health care. Medical schools should respond by introducing changes in the medical education process and ensure the proper training of a new generation of doctors who are community- and socially oriented, capable of relating to the community and its needs. The health care system should also respond to these changes by restructuring its organization and finance to ensure quality in health care and that health services are not rationed according to an individual's ability to pay. There are apparent advantages in establishing close links between medical education and health care. Both systems and the community stand to gain from these links. Full integration of the two systems could be the final objective but should be preceded by careful study and experimentation.

Socioeconomic Human Rights: Past and Future

This is an exploration of the sources of and economic proclaimed in major twentieth century international human instruments. Efforts are made to explore particular sources of such and state duties in order to reconsider certain widely supported propositions. One of the propositions examined in this paper is the idea that something termed social rights evolved from the late nineteenth century as part of an expanding conception of national citizenry. The late British historian, T. H. Marshall, has incomparable influence on the literature concerning human through his thesis of a three-stage development of the of citizens, this ending with the emergence of rights.' Marshall's work draws rather sharp lines between such rights, identified with the availability of protection programs to every citizen as a matter of legal right and earlier approaches to protection that were based on means tests, programs that had little direct effect on inequality and that were not woven into the fabric of citizenship.2 A second issue that is addressed is the relationship between centuries old paternalistic ideas about the socioeconomic welfare of the poor which led to programs designed to promote protection at the national level and current interpretations of internationally prescribed and economic rights. Did the organized international community, during the quarter century following World War II, seek to go beyond paternalistic conceptions that focus on the duties of states rather than of the individuals? Or, alternatively, did that community merely prescribe a lowest common denominator of state duties in the name of human rights?

Socioeconomic Human Rights: The United Nations, the United States, and beyond

A majority of states in the U.N. General Assembly tends to emphasize the priority of socioeconomic rights, perhaps to the exclusion of civil-political rights. President Jimmy Carter signed and sent to the Senate the U.N. Covenant on Social, Economic, and Cultural Rights. President Ronald Reagan, however, does not like to speak about socioeconomic rights; indeed, spokesmen for the Reagan Administration have strongly suggested that socioeconomic rights do not exist. This essay first charts these two polarized positions, then offers reflections on the clashing conceptions. The point of these reflections is to suggest that neither of these two views completely comprehends reality. The subject of socioeconomic rights involves some weighty matters: the overall effect of capitalism, the relation of capitalism to civil-political rights, the history of the West since the industrial revolution, the result of state intervention in Latin America, the nature of the structure of international economics, the extent of equality in America, and more. The reader will no doubt understand that in the following short article I do not pretend to provide the definitive answers to these questions, which after all have been examined in countless volumes through the years. What I do attempt is to distill some of the major points from these previously published perspectives and present them in a provocative think piece.