The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights ─ Commentary, Cases, and Materials

Economic, social, and cultural rights are finally coming of age. This book brings together all essential documents, materials, and case law relating to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) - one of the most important human rights instruments in international law - and its Optional Protocol. This book presents extracts from primary materials alongside critical commentary and analysis, placing the documents in their wider context and situating economic, social, and cultural rights within the broader human rights framework.

There is increasing interest internationally, regionally, and in domestic legal systems in the protection of economic, social, and cultural rights. The Optional Protocol of 2008 allows for individual communications to be made to the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights after its entry into force in 2013. At the regional level, socio-economic rights are well embedded in human rights systems in Europe, Africa and the Americas. At the national level, constitutions and courts have increasingly regarded socio-economic rights as justiciable, narrowing the traditional divide with civil and political rights.

This book contextualises these developments in the context of the ICESCR. It provides detailed analysis of the ICESCR structured around its articles, drawing on national as well as international case law and materials, and containing all of the key primary materials in its extensive appendices. This book is indispensible for the judiciary, human rights practitioners, government legal advisers and agencies, national human rights institutions, international organisations, regional human rights bodies, NGOs and human rights activists, academics, and students alike.

Ben Saul, Professor of International Law, Sydney Law School, The University of Sydney,David Kinley, Professor of Human Rights Law, Sydney Law School, The University of Sydney,Jaqueline Mowbray, Senior Lecturer, Sydney Law School, The University of Sydney

Ben Saul is Professor of International Law and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow at the University of Sydney. Ben has expertise on global counter-terrorism law, human rights, the law of armed conflict, and international criminal law. He has published 10 books, 75 scholarly articles, and hundreds of other publications and presentations, and his research has been used in national and international courts. Ben has taught law at Oxford, the Hague Academy of International Law and in China, India, Nepal and Cambodia, and has been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School. Ben practises as a barrister in international and national courts, has advised various United Nations bodies and foreign governments, has delivered foreign aid projects, and often appears in the media. He has a doctorate in law from Oxford and honours degrees in Arts and Law from Sydney.

Professor David Kinley holds the Chair in Human Rights Law at University of Sydney. He is also an Academic Panel member of Doughty Street Chambers in London, a member of the Australian Council for Human Rights, and was a founding member of Australian Lawyers for Human Rights. He is currently on the Faculty of Oxford/George Washington Universities' International Human Rights Law Summer School and has previously held teaching positions at Cambridge University, ANU, University of New South Wales, Washington College of Law, American University, and Paris 1 (La Sorbonne). He was also the founding Director of the Castan Centre for Human Rights Law at Monash University (2000-2005). David was a Senior Fulbright Scholar in 2004, based in Washington DC, and the Herbert Smith Visiting Fellow at the Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge in 2008. He has written and edited eleven books and more than 100 articles, book chapters, reports and papers.

Jacqueline Mowbray is a Senior Lecturer in Law and Co-Director of the Sydney Centre for International Law at the University of Sydney. She is a graduate of the Universities of Queensland (BA LLB (Hons)), Melbourne (LLM) and Cambridge (LLM (Hons) PhD). Jacqueline has practised as a solicitor with Freehills in Melbourne and Barlow Lyde & Gilbert in London, and she teaches on the European Masters program in human rights, which is taught at the University of Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina. Her particular area of interest is international law and legal theory, with a focus on international human rights law. She is currently working on a number of projects relating to international law and language policy, and the position of linguistic minorities under international law. Jacqueline also teaches in the area of commercial law and international commercial transactions.