The universal declaration of human rights recognises two sets of human rights. The traditional civil and political rights, as well is economic, social and cultural rights. In transforming the decorations provisions into legally binding obligations, the United Nations adopted two separate international covenants which, taken together, constitute the International to protect human rights. The official position, dating back to the universal declaration reaffirmed in resolutions since that time, is that the two covenants and sets of freedoms, in the words adopted by the second world conference in Vienna, ‘universal, indivisible and interdependent. But this formal consensus masks deep and enduring disagreement over the proper status of economic, social and cultural elements.
One extreme bias of the view that these rights are superior to civil and political rights in the appropriate value hierarchy and in chronological terms. Of what use is the right to free speech to those who are starving and illiterate? At the other extreme we find the view that economic and social rights to not constitute rights as properly understood at all. Treating them as rights undermines the enjoyment of individual freedom, distorts the functioning of free markets by justifying large-scale state intervention in the economy, and provides an excuse to downgrade the importance of civil and political rights. although variations on these extremes have dominated both diplomatic and academic discourse, the great majority of governments have taken some sort of intermediate position.
For the most part the position has involved support for the importance of economic and social rights as of March 2000 142 states were parties to the international convention on economic social and cultural rights, compared with 144 parties to the International covenant on civil and political rights, taken together with a failure to keep steps to entrench those rights constitutionally, to adopt legislative or administrative provisions based explicitly on the recognition of specific economic and social rights as international human rights, or to provide effective means of redress to individuals or groups alleging violations of those rights. Indeed, one of the puzzles in the field lies in the rare invocation of the International covenant on economic social and cultural rights in the play of internal politics or in the judiciary is in most states, compared with the frequent indication of civil and political rights provisions of the universal declaration of human rights, the International covenant on civil and political rights to such as European Convention on human rights.