A/HRC/32/31
United Nations
General Assembly
Distr.: General
28 April 2016
Original: English
Human Rights Council
Thirty-second session
Agenda item 3
Promotion and protection of all human rights, civil,
political, economic, social and cultural rights,
including the right to development
Report of the Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and
human rights*
Note by the Secretariat
The Secretariat has the honour to transmit to the Human Rights Council the report of
the Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, prepared
pursuant to Human Rights Council resolution 26/3. In the report, the Special Rapporteur
argues that treating economic and social rights as human rights is essential both for efforts
to eliminate extreme poverty and to ensure a balanced and credible approach in the field of
human rights as a whole. He argues that economic and social rights currently remain
marginal in most contexts, thus undermining the principle of the indivisibility of the two
sets of rights.
Conventional wisdom celebrates the great strides that have been made in recent
years in relation to economic and social rights. At the international level, the Optional
Protocol to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights has been
adopted, an impressive number of special procedures have been created to focus on these
rights and bodies like the Human Rights Council spend much more time than they once did
debating these issues. At the national level, economic and social rights proponents celebrate
the impressive degree of constitutional recognition of some or most economic and social
rights, the growing capacity of courts in many countries to enforce them, the growth of
national non-governmental organizations working on economic and social rights and the
emergence of a vibrant scholarly literature on the justiciability of those rights.
However, despite important recent progress, the reality is that economic and social
rights remain largely invisible in the law and institutions of the great majority of States. In
support of this proposition, the Special Rapporteur notes that: many of the States whose
Constitutions recognize economic and social rights have not translated that recognition into
a human rights-based legislative framework; the increasingly widespread constitutional
* The present report was submitted after the deadline in order to reflect the most recent developments.
GE.16-06981(E)