Book Description

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 aim to describe the minimum core content of different socio-economic rights, first from an international law perspective and then, by way of response from a South African perspective. In the process the normative content of the rights concerned is given flesh: the authors attempt to identify particular obligations that can be said to form the core of rights such as the right to housing, the right to food, the right to education and the rights to social security and assistance. At the same time the concept of a minimum core content, or 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. This book as a result contains a great deal of practically useful information for use by human rights practitioners, both legal and non-legal. At the same time it provides some critical reflection on that information and the conceptual framework from which it is derived.