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A group of United Nations human rights experts, including Maina Kiai, today urged world Governments to ratify a key international instrument that allows individuals and groups who have been denied their economic, social and cultural rights to have their claims reviewed directly by a UN committee of experts. 
The Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which has just entered into force, has been ratified so far by ten pioneering States: Argentina, Bolivia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Ecuador, El Salvador, Mongolia, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain and Uruguay, forming a “club for social justice”.
“This new procedure empowers individuals and groups, regardless of their nationality or migration status, to invoke, among other things, the rights to food, water and sanitation, health, education, housing, work and social security, before the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights,” the experts said.
The UN independent experts stressed that the Optional Protocol represents “a major step in the protection and realization of economic, social and cultural rights, and a powerful affirmation that they are as important as civil and political rights, and fundamentally interrelated and interdependent with them.” This new mechanism, they added, gives hope against the impending retrogression inherent in many so-called ‘austerity measures.’ “Such retrogression is incompatible with article 5 of the Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights”.
“Case law is living law that gives a name and a face to individual victims,” the experts noted. “It is dynamic and future-oriented and it creates precedent that serves a triple purpose: to provide a tailored remedy in specific situations, concretize the norms so as to facilitate their understanding by public officials and enforcement by domestic courts, and ultimately contribute to the prevention of violations,” the experts added.
“The ‘club for social justice’ will surely grow, as was the case with the Optional Protocol to the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which since its entry into force in 1976 has mandated the Human Rights Committee to register and examine thousands of cases, leading to the adoption of ground-breaking case-law and concrete remedies to the victims,” the experts said.
“We urge Governments worldwide to join this ‘club for social justice’, and call on human rights defenders, national human rights institutions and civil society at large to publicize this new petitions procedure in a concerted effort aiming at the ratification of the Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, so as to advance toward universal participation,” the UN independent experts concluded.
The full press release is available via OHCHR in English and Chinese.
