Access to food is essential to human survival and the “right to food” is a fundamental human right whose fulfillment impinges on the realization of most other human rights. Yet the pervasiveness of human hunger worldwide starkly illustrates the ongoing failure to fulfill the "right to food."...

The International Covenant for Economic Social and Cultural Rights, ICESCR, commits states to progressively realize the economic and social rights enumerated in the Covenant. This poses a challenge to measurement. It is not enough to assess the extent to which rights are enjoyed in a country or...

This paper adapts the economic and social rights index (ESRF) developed by Fukuda-Parr et. al. (2009) to assess the extent to which each of the 50 U.S. states fulfills the economic and social rights obligations set forth in the International Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights. It...

In response to an increasing demand for rigorous monitoring of state accountability in meeting their human rights obligations, a growing literature on human rights measurement has emerged. Yet there are no widely used indicators or indices of human rights obligations fulfillment. This paper...

The human rights community characterizes the relationships among the various human rights enumerated in the major international human rights instruments as indivisible, interdependent, and interrelated. This working paper raises issues on intellectual and operational grounds as to whether all...

Building on previously proposed methodology for an index of economic and social rights fulfillment, this paper presents country scores and rankings based on the Economic and Social Rights Fulfillment Index (ESRF Index). Unlike socio-economic indicators, which are often used as proxies for the...

Human rights are said to be "indivisible, interdependent and interrelated." However widely used within UN parlance and among scholars and activists, these terms are rarely unpacked and often used interchangeably. This short paper attempts to untangle the meanings and values these terms represent...

Economic rights can be instantiated in a variety of ways. This paper investigates the problem with making economic rights into policy from one source: the political policymaker. By modeling the policymaker's decision problem we can identify particular decision flaws and possible correctives that...

This paper summarizes findings and conclusions from our application of the Economic and Social Rights Fulfillment Index developed by Fukuda-Parr, Lawson-Remer and Randolph (2009) to the states of Brazil. The key features of this methodology in assessing economic and human rights fulfillment is...