This chapter addresses some of the many ways that unilateral coercive measures run counter to international human rights law. Such measures may directly compromise the human rights to health, education, economic and social rights, and the right to development as well as sustainable development goals. The chapter addresses the expanding practice of the use of unilateral sanctions, provides an assessment of the possibility of imposing unilateral sanctions as countermeasures or retorsions, and provides an overview of the humanitarian impact of different types of sanctions on different categories of human rights. It looks at the recent developments in sanctioning practice. In particular, as targeted sanctions are usually presented as a good alternative to the comprehensive ones, minimizing humanitarian impact of unilateral measures, the chapter addresses the grounds for targeted unilateral sanctions, assesses their impact on the human rights of directly designated individuals, as well as other people and targeted populations in general. It concludes that listings of individuals regularly run counter to the right to due process. Additionally, most recently unilateral sanctions have compromised internet access, which in turn undermines access to many essential services.

This chapter features a broad spectrum of voices of the 1960s which all, if to varying degrees, used the normative framework of human rights in their growing criticisms of global inequalities: from pan-Africanists to the 1960s Popes to development economist Barbara Ward to other key figures in the UN community of ideas. Building upon new research on the global history of human rights, the chapter demonstrates that human rights were deployed to criticize global material inequality; that their protagonists were concerned with distributive justice; and that it was a long quest to defend economic and social human rights. Global inequalities, including those pertaining to racism and empire, were increasingly unjustifiable – to some extent in the very light of the growing legitimacy of human rights. It was a decade in which international economic and social human rights acquired a hitherto unparalleled legitimacy with the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. The chapter sheds new light on figures such as Barbara Ward, the 1960s Popes, Ralph Bunche, and UNESCO official Malcolm Adiseshiah.

This chapter focuses on the history of human rights thinking mainly in the aftermath of the founding of the United Nations. It focuses primarily on international jurist Hersch Lauterpacht and secondarily on political scientist Arthur Holcombe. Whereas the 1948 UDHR has received much attention in human rights historiography, the chapter tells a story less told of how key intellectuals at the time grappled with international economic and social human rights. Little studied in the scholarly literature that have mainly focused on Lauterpacht’s legacy in inventing the legal concept of “crimes against humanity,” the chapter argues that his thinking on the international protection of human rights in 1950 was a nuanced, qualified, and careful, yet uncompromising defense of economic and social rights. Ultimately, while Lauterpacht’s defense of human rights mainly relied on the all-important negative principle of safeguarding individuals against the state – a protection from evil and harm that the contemporary order had blatantly failed to secure in the case of the Holocaust – it also entailed a more positive principle of facilitating human flourishing.

Whereas political and intellectual debates about the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights have received considerable scholarly attention, the intellectual history of international economic and social human rights in the 1950s remains an understudied topic. This chapter investigates this history, zooming in upon Ralph Bunche, Gunnar Myrdal, and Moses Moskowitz, and mapping their main arguments in favor of economic and social human rights. Within the domineering horizon of the global Cold War, they argued in favor of internationalizing economic and social human rights, even if their chances of success, admittedly, looked very slim. It was a human rights advocacy that included a criticism of material inequality. This advocacy flowed from several actors in various parts of the UN – from Bunche’s and Myrdal’s UN leadership positions preoccupied, respectively, with political conflicts and decolonization and economic development, to Moskowitz representing the Jewish minority at the UN and dedicated solely to human rights advocacy. Little noted in the scholarly literature, economic, and social human rights had some degree of salience within the burgeoning discourses on development too.

Beginning with a discussion of the right to strike in international law, the chapter explains how most industrial action was regarded as a tortious wrong. Statute provides a limited immunity for trade unions and their officials for industrial action that is part of a trade dispute. In order to obtain that immunity in tort, trade unions must carry out a secret ballot of the members to demonstrate that there is majority support for a strike. Apart from the foregoing, this chapter also examines legal restrictions on secondary action and picketing, and concludes with a discussion of the limited impact of the Human Rights Act 1998 on the scope of the right to strike in British law.

This chapter nuances the widespread view that human rights became the world’s global morality in the post–Cold War era. Investigating examples from international human rights law and intellectual history, it demonstrates that economic and social human rights did not come to enjoy the same status as civil and political rights. The mid-1970s to the 1980s was a period of frustration for economic and social human rights. Within a few years, hopes for a more egalitarian international world order with international obligations to promote economic and social human rights were shattered. Major factors were the dynamics of postcolonialism, the global Cold War and state power logics, and neoliberalism. Partly as a testimony to this, intellectuals such as Amartya Sen were concerned with basic rights. The post–Global Cold War period was marked by a premature sentiment of human rights triumphalism, though there were important efforts to strengthen economic and social human rights. As witnessed from the backlashes against these rights in the twenty-first century, their wider legitimacy and influence has remained much weaker than their advocates have hoped for.

This introduction presents the main arguments of the book, develops a novel terminological framework, and situates the book in current research. First, from the perspective of international economic and social human rights, this is not an age of human rights triumphalism. The main human rights advocates featured in this book were concerned with international justice and redistributive justice, and theirs was a long quest to lift international economic and social human rights onto a level-playing field through three phases: internationalizing rights, criticizing global inequalities through rights, and attempting to secure the legitimacy of these rights once and for all. Second, on a broader egalitarian plateau, human rights advocacy can be situated on a redistributionist terrain. Third, this book supplements institutional, organizational, diplomatic, political, and movement-centered research on international human rights. There is a gap in existing scholarship in understanding historical interrelations between human rights and inequalities, which is where this book intervenes, above all from an intellectual historical perspective.

This chapter analyzes the development of discourses on human rights and on inequality from 1962 until 1974 through the lens of Manouchehr Ganji, an Iranian human rights scholar and UN Special Rapporteur. Where other scholars have examined Ganji’s report The Widening Gap from 1973 with a key focus upon its impact within the UN, this chapter contextualizes the report in three novel ways, bringing in his 1962 doctoral dissertation not previously studied in the research literature; connecting it to how inequality became a major theme in the late 1960s and early 1970s broadly across development discourse, and to how human rights increasingly were deployed to denounce inequality; and, finally, by discussing these developments with regard to recent discussions of the historical relationships between human rights, inequality, and neoliberalism. Crucially, beyond the singularity of the one individual studied most in this chapter stands a much more general and pertinent point: The human rights project in 1973 was an ambitious anti-inequality project. It was a structural approach to human rights, aiming at undoing deeper within- and between-nation inequalities.

This chapter analyzes discourses on universal economic and social human rights and social democracy in connection with intellectuals discussing the American and British war aims of World War II. It was an age of major societal transformations: the socialization of work due to industrial capitalism; experiences of authoritarian ideologies emerging out of, inter alia, extreme inequality; and nascent uproars against racism and imperialism. Human rights were part of moral discourses on equality and social justice in the aftermath of the Great Depression and critiques of laissez-faire capitalism. The chapter details how Ralph Bunche and George Herbert Wells championed a vision of social democracy and human rights. Bunche and Wells intervened in wartime when many intellectuals across the political and religious spectrum would write of human rights. Key intellectual actors increasingly referred to a new political “space” of “the world,” and some were redefining “democracy” as a “world” and a “social” democracy. Revisiting their thinking allows for a more detailed reconstruction of their argumentation, including on how, specifically, they defended economic and social human rights.

During the era of détente, Soviet and US leaders pursued common interests in controlling the spread of nuclear weapons, limiting the cost of the arms race, and expanding trade. Summit meetings brought agreements on nuclear non-proliferation, arms limitation, and space exploration. Yet, after a high point of friendly negotiation in the early 1970s, friction and competition overshadowed cooperation. While the unraveling of détente has often been blamed on Soviet adventurism in the “Third World,” this chapter presents a more balanced explanation. It notes that the United States too intervened around the world, argues that geopolitical competition was not the sole cause of tension, and highlights how domestic political dynamics disrupted relations between the superpowers. After the divisive and destructive US war in Vietnam, many Americans yearned to recover faith in their moral superiority. Denunciations of Soviet human rights violations, including restrictions on Jewish emigration and repression of dissidents, contributed to a revival of confidence in American virtues while irritating Soviet leaders. Long before the USSR invaded Afghanistan in 1979, acrimony eclipsed partnership.

Chapter 1 introduces the main issues raised in Labour Law and its social and economic significance in regulating workplace relations. The chapter introduces the principal sources of labour law in the UK, which include statutes, the common law and European law and the difficulties in securing compliance by employers with those laws. It describes the system of employment tribunals and ordinary courts where disputes are resolved. Finally the chapter introduces some contemporary themes concerning precarious work, work/life balance and human rights at work.