This disparity is due in part to the indeterminacy of socioeconomic rights. To talk meaningfully about a right to an ‘adequate standard of living’ requires an ability to adjudicate that right. By comparison assessing whether a right to freedom from torture or freedom of speech has been breached presents a straightforward proposition. This allows politicians charged with implementing these rights considerable definitional discretion. [...]
That these rights are afforded less significance is no accident. As Samuel Moyn has argued, human rights’ commitment to individual freedom coincides with neoliberalism's commitment to the market, property rights and suspicion of the state.
This coincidence conspires to circumscribe the class of acceptable claims leaving those claims that challenge existing economic relations strictly off-limits. When Raquel Rolnik, the UN’s special rapporteur on housing, called on the Government to rethink the ‘bedroom tax’, arguing that it eroded the right to adequate housing, the then housing minister Kris Hopkins labelled her report a “misleading Marxist diatribe.” [...]
Nevertheless the prominence of rights as a progressive discourse is in danger of crowding out other political possibilities. When compared with socioeconomic rights, the alleged apoliticism of civil and political rights naturalise and protect distributions of property and power. Any future role for rights must reckon with the unintended consequences of their claims to universalism.
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