Exploring the core content of socio-economic rights: South African and international perspectives

This book brings together a series of papers and responses to papers presented at a conference on the minimum core content of socio-economic rights in Pretoria, South Africa, during August 2000. The papers describe, first from an international law perspective and then from a South African perspective, these socio-economic rights. In the process, the normative content of rights concerned is given flesh: the authors identify particular obligations that can be said to form the core of rights, such as the right to housing, the right to food, rights to education and social security and assistance. At the same time, the concept of a minimum core obligations of economic and social rights is problematised and the difficulties of using concepts, developed within the general and abstract realm of international law, in the more particular and concrete context of domestic rights adjudication are explored. As a result, this book contains a great deal of practical information and is useful for human rights practitioners, both legal and non-legal. It also provides some critical reflection on the conceptual framework from which it is derived.