This paper provides a detailed keyword analysis of the 142 out of 198 national constitutions that include at least one reference to the environment as of 2010. Out of these 142 constitutions, 125 contain provisions that are explicitly related to environmental human rights, and ten include a...

We present, to the best of our knowledge, the first economic model of the human right to water using a nonrenewable resource model inclusive of a backstop technology. The right is interpreted as a minimum consumption requirement the government is obligated to fulfill in the event that any one...

This paper builds on the work of the Working Group and High Level Task Force on the Right to Development to devise a set of Right to Development criteria, sub-criteria and operational sub-criteria (indicators) that could be used by international organizations, governments, and civil society to...

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...

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."...

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...

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...

There exist a great number of measurement projects intended to benchmark the human condition as it relates to aspirations of human dignity. One thing these efforts have in common is that they are indicators of outcomes, or records of events. Measuring outcomes is methodologically appropriate and...

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 are central to the international human rights regime, even if they have received less attention historically (at least in the West). This chapter, and the volume from which it is drawn, investigates the central conceptual, measurement, and policy issues confronting economic...