Not by bread alone ... but not without bread either.

• Author: Hammarberg, Thomas
• Position: Economic and social rights

Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.

Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.

Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.

- Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 23 (1, 2 and 3)

There is a widespread misunderstanding about human rights: that the y are limited to freedom of speech, protection against torture, and other civil and political rights. It is important that the real meaning of the "rights package" is clarified.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights established that human rights include the right to social security, the right to a reasonable living standard, the right to food, the right to education, the right to housing, the right to health, the right to work and the right to rest and leisure. This is important. It makes social justice a matter of right. It draws a clear line between entitlement and charity. If one day you are in need of State support, the re is an enormous difference between receiving such support, because you have a right to it or because someone feels pity for you. The "rights approach" to social welfare protects the dignity of everyone, even the weakest in society.

However, the inclusion of economic and social rights in the Universal Declaration was controversial from the very, beginning. When it was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in December 1948, the re were already voices-not least in the United States-which argued that "Freedom from Want", to use the language of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, should not be seen as a human right.

This division contributed to the unfortunate stalemate in the debate on human rights within the United Nations in the fifties. In the shadow of the cold war, the effort to translate the Universal Declaration into a binding legal convention on human rights was frustrated for years. Not before 1966 could the General Assembly adopt texts with legally-binding human rights norms. However, it had become necessary to separate the rights listed in the Universal Declaration into two conventions.

Now we have the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. The fact that it was not possible to keep all the se rights within the same package perpetuated the perception that the y were different in nature, that economic and social rights were secondary. This misunderstanding was further spread by a terminology which grouped the se rights into different "generations", with economic and social rights being placed in the second generation.

The distinction had an impact: in reality, economic and social rights were neglected in the discussion. The United Nations Commission on Human Rights spent little time on the se rights, and the committee set up to monitor them received a lower status than did the Committee on Civil and Political Rights. General Assembly statements that all rights were of equal importance and indivisible did not help much. All this had ideological...