Kent Law School’s Centre for Critical International law is holding a workshop on 6 June 2013 entitled Economic and Social Rights in the Age of Neo-liberalism .
The aim of the workshop is to generate debate and scholarship on development policies that are designed to assist rather than undermine states’ efforts to protect the economic social and cultural rights of their peoples. Critical scholarship in the field of economic social and cultural rights reveals that developed states both individually through foreign aid provision, and collectively through regional organisations such as the EU and international bodies such as the Bretton Woods institutions, have tended to instrumentalise human rights promotion for their own political and economic ends. The overwhelming force of the neo-liberal mode of globalisation, with its focus on market capitalism, small government, deregulation, privatisation and flexible workforces, has all too often resulted in aid and loans being conditional on recipient states doing the bidding of Western states. Education, health, and water supplies for example have been privatised to meet aid conditionalities imposed from outside, often with the result that millions of the poor are being systematically denied basic human rights. There is evidence of contagion – Greece, Italy and Spain are now being required to cut public expenditure in return for aid. Yet the International Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights requires states parties “to take steps, individually and through international assistance and co-operation,… to the maximum of its available resources” in order to achieve progressively the full realisation of the rights recognised in the Covenant.
Some of the questions to be addressed include: How and in what ways do neo-liberal policies of international and regional organisations conflict with states’ obligations to protect economic and social rights of their citizens? What can states do to protect the economic and social rights of their peoples consistent with their international human rights obligations? How can developing (and increasingly developed) states retain their sovereign choices in deciding how best to protect the economic and social rights of their people? Are there other modes of development policies that can promote human rights whilst at the same time protecting the sovereignty of the states concerned?
The speakers for this workshop include:
Mr Iain Byrne – Acting Head of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights Team Amnesty International
Dr Jayan Nayar – University of Warwick, Lecturer/Reader (TBC) in Law, University of Warwick
Dr Sari Kouvo – Co-director and co-founder of the Afghanistan Analysts Network
Prof Harm Schepel – Professor of Law, Brussels School of International Studies