A/HRC/32/31 (27), the Committee recommended that legislation be enacted or amended in order to implement Covenant obligations. C. Non-governmental organizations 56. One of the most encouraging developments in recent years in relation to economic and social rights has been the growth of specialist NGOs at the international, national and, especially, local levels working to promote either economic and social rights in general or specific rights such as those relating to health, housing, education, water, gender equality, disability and ageing. 57. Nevertheless, some of the major international NGOs continue to approach economic and social rights in ways that do very little to change the marginality of those rights within the field. This is especially problematic because these organizations still disproportionately influence the overall shape of the non-governmental agenda, especially at the international level. Good faith efforts in recent years to develop a more positive and proactive approach to economic and social rights have succeeded in moving the field forward in relation to several issues that are important, even though they represent a rather narrow slice of the overall economic and social rights pie. Reporting on issues such as forced evictions, maternal mortality, discrimination in access to schooling, access to palliative care and to HIV/AIDS drugs, and sexual and reproductive health, has contributed significantly in these areas, but the approaches adopted have too often relied almost entirely on using a discrimination lens and avoided reliance on the economic and social rights framework. When combined with policies that eschew issues that involve redistributing resources or require significant budgetary allocations, the approach can amount to a self-denying ordinance that effectively maintains the status quo and ensures that the core economic and social rights issues will not be adequately addressed. 58. When constitutions are being rewritten, the major NGOs are vocal in calling for the inclusion of civil and political rights, but rarely mention economic and social rights. When transitional justice mechanisms are being shaped, their concerns focus overwhelmingly on civil and political rights, even though many such violations go hand in hand with economic and social rights violations, and the measures required to bring reconciliation and justice would need to incorporate economic and social rights dimensions if they are to be comprehensive as well as designed to avoid non-repetition. Instead, those issues are most likely to be characterized as development concerns. 59. One of the biggest economic and social rights challenges confronted by civil society organizations has been to identify a methodology for monitoring these rights. This has gone hand in hand with questions about who bears responsibility for economic and social rights violations, to whom demands for action should be addressed, how judgments can be made as to the acceptability of trade-offs between one social right and another and what remedies are appropriate. These dilemmas are especially problematic in the absence of the RIA framework at the national level, but many of the NGOs have either consciously or otherwise not directed their attention to these dimensions. Others have dismissed them as issues in relation to which international NGOs are poorly placed to advocate.33 33 18 “International human rights organizations might press governments to adopt the legislation — the statutory rights — needed to make litigation a meaningful tool to enforce ESC rights. That is inevitably useful, but it is a procedural device that still falls significantly short of actual implementation.” See Kenneth Roth, “Defending economic, social and cultural rights: practical issues faced by an international human rights organization”, Human Rights Quarterly, vol. 26, No. 1 (February 2004), p. 63.