This chapter introduces the two types of rights in copyright : economic and moral rights. The chapter considers to what extent these rights are rights of property (the conceptual question).

The Colombian Constitutional Court has decisively undertaken the role of guaranteeing the normative force of economic and social rights. It has devised several tools to that effect, among them a test to evaluate regressive measures. This chapter examines rulings that review statutory norms in the abstract, before arguments that denounce them as illegitimate retrogressions in the enjoyment of social and economic rights. These claims are assessed by applying what we call the “integrated regression test.” The chapter establishes the meaning, structure, operation and efficacy of this test, which uses proportionality analysis as an allocation method. It dissects how it operates to safeguard rights when their minimum core or preexisting associated benefits are withdrawn. The integrated regression test proves to be a strong and complex scrutiny, even if not completely unified in its use, with a wide range of singularities and a tendency to be more protective of social rather than economic rights.

This chapter sketches the development of international human rights law. The legal position of individuals was perceived by states as a domestic affair of the sovereign state, which could effectively treat its citizens as it pleased. It was not until after the Second World War that this fundamentally changed and international law began to grant individuals rights to protect them from the state. The chapter further presents the main categories or generations of human rights and discusses their key characteristics. Human rights are generally organized in three categories or generations: (a) civil and political rights; (b) economic, social, and cultural rights; and (c) collective rights. This chapter will subsequently turn to several matters concerning the scope of human rights norms, including their addressees, their territorial scope of application, and the circumstances under which human rights may be restricted by the state. Finally, this chapter will explain how human rights are monitored and enforced under international law.

This chapter sketches the development of international human rights law. The legal position of individuals was perceived by states as a domestic affair of the sovereign state, which could effectively treat its citizens as it pleased. It was not until after the Second World War that this fundamentally changed and international law began to grant individuals rights to protect them from the state. The chapter further presents the main categories or generations of human rights and discusses their key characteristics. Human rights are generally organized in three categories or generations: (a) civil and political rights; (b) economic, social, and cultural rights; and (c) collective rights. This chapter will subsequently turn to several matters concerning the scope of human rights norms, including their addressees, their territorial scope of application, and the circumstances under which human rights may be restricted by the state. Finally, this chapter will explain how human rights are monitored and enforced under international law.

Considers how rights have been used to address economic and social justice. Social and economic justice advocates turned toward what is commonly called a rights-based approach to development, beginning in the 1990s. The case study in this chapter traces how and why Oxfam recast its goals as a set of what it called “basic rights.” Incorporated original interviews and archival research to outline Oxfam’s adoption of human rights language in its aid and economic justice advocacy work. Rights-based advocacy by development groups was taken up at the same time that traditional human rights NGOs hotly debated how and whether to take up economic, social, and cultural rights more directly. Argues that the emergence of rights arguments in development work demonstrate the potential flexibility of human rights tools in justice-seeking.

Gender has always shaped rights in particularly visible ways, from the supposedly abstract, universal and gender-neutral civil and political rights articulated in the French Revolution of 1789, to the twenty-first century, where rights are claimed on the basis of membership in specific groups. Throughout this long period of over two-and-a-quarter centuries, sexual difference has complicated concepts of rights and how they have been recognised and put into practice. This chapter explores these complexities and questions the very category of ‘socio-economic’ rights.  Examining the place of sexual difference in conceptualising rights and duties demonstrates that whereas employers and the state acknowledged economic rights and social rights for men, economic rights did not automatically accompany social rights for women. Indeed, these two sets of rights were often at odds, as women’s problematic economic citizenship in France illustrates.

In this chapter, I explore the topic of the economic rights of non-citizens through the lens of the history of philosophy. I make two different but interconnected arguments in this chapter. In the first part of the chapter, I examine the claims made by John Locke, Adam Smith, and Friedrich von Hayek that a well-regulated market, supplemented by robust government support, is necessary for the realization of basic economic rights. Though the views of Locke, Smith, and Hayek are important in understanding how economic rights can be realized and the role the state should play in this, they do not directly address what this might mean for non-citizens. I suggest in the next part that their views must be supplemented by the work of Hannah Arendt and her concept of the right to have rights. I suggest that her argument that the right to have rights is more fundamental than human rights can be extended to economic rights. Non-citizens need a right to have economic rights, that is, a right to belong to an economic community. I conclude by discussing the example of refugees in the Global South and some ways that we might support a right to have economic rights.

An important starting point is our claim that Article 10 of the Berne Convention creates an obligation on Members of the Union to recognise a limitation on the copyright that allows for quotation. The proposition is based primarily on the language used: Article 10 begins with the words, ‘It shall be permissible … ’. This imperative language may be contrasted with Article 10(2) Berne, which, in relation to exceptions for education states: ‘It shall be a matter for legislation in the countries of the Union … to permit’. Similar permissive language is also found in Article 10bis in relation to reporting current events and Article 9(2), which allows exceptions to the reproduction right ‘in certain special cases’. The language of Article 10(1) is distinct and clearly reads as mandatory rather than permissive. Although there is barely any reference to the mandatory nature of the exception in the Stockholm travaux, the limitation is described in terms that reflect its basis in the entitlement of the user.

How do women access social, economic, and political power in settings where multiple, interlinked systems prevent female influence and agency? More fundamentally: how does a low status group challenge and destabilize what prior to that point appeared to be a highly stable, inegalitarian system? In this chapter, I construct a theory linking women’s political representation to their economic agency. I utilize analysis of electoral behavior and negotiations of political authority and rights garnered from extensive field research to develop my “gatekeeper theory” of how women’s representation impacts enforcement of economic rights and subsequent welfare. I argue that constitutional reforms mandating female representation catalyze change. We see this clearly where economic reforms present an opportunity for women to translate political voice into entitlements to inherit the most precious resource and primary repository of wealth in contemporary India: land. Whether an individual experiences backlash or benefits depends on her bargaining power at the time she gains enforceable property rights, thanks to the confluence of reform and quotas mandating female representation. I include individual narratives to explain the scope and significance of my theory. I also investigate how social norms and their enforcement and contestation are evolving in light of changing political representation.

This chapter summarizes developments in international human rights law, mechanisms, and policies since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted. We first describe the nine core human rights treaties, including the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which together converted the Declaration’s ideals into international law, and the seven conventions with the goals of eliminating racial discrimination, discrimination against women, torture, and enforced disappearances, and protecting the rights of children, migrant workers, and their families, as well as persons with disabilities. We follow with summaries of the Genocide Convention and of the UN declarations proclaiming the rights of indigenous peoples and LGBTI individuals. We next describe the UN mechanisms for advancing human rights, including the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Human Rights Council, and International Criminal Court. These are followed by summaries of UN policies for protecting persons from governmental abuses, ending the world’s worst poverty and suffering, and providing human rights guides for businesses. We then summarize developments in international humanitarian law (the laws of war) and conclude with a brief overview of the five regional human rights systems.