A/HRC/32/31 I. Introduction 1. The present report is submitted in accordance with Human Rights Council resolution 26/3. It is the second report submitted to the Council by Philip Alston in his capacity as Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights. 1 A. Paradoxical status of economic and social rights 2. Strategies to eliminate extreme poverty require efforts to promote the realization of all human rights, in accordance with the principle of the indivisibility of rights. While various reports submitted over the years by the Special Rapporteur have dealt with some of the civil and political rights dimensions of the equation, none has focused explicitly on the overall economic and social rights component, which is the focus of the present report. The present report is not typical of those presented to the Council. The former head of the Department of Peacekeeping Operations characterized United Nations reports as “painfully boring … in which everything said is factually correct and yet where nothing really stimulates fresh thinking”.2 Clearly, factually correct reports are crucial, but reports which additionally stimulate fresh thinking are equally important, and the present one attempts to be both. The Special Rapporteur argues that, despite a great deal of diplomatic and expert activity on the issue of economic and social rights, 3 as well as an emerging body of case law and abundant scholarship, those rights nevertheless remain largely invisible in the law and institutions of the great majority of States. 3. This assessment sits most uneasily with the conventional wisdom that celebrates huge strides in recent years in relation to economic and social rights, including through their widespread constitutional recognition, and in the growing capacity of courts in many countries to enforce them. Thus, for example, it has been claimed that “the global language of human rights, and of economic and social rights in particular, pervades progressive politics around the world”.4 Those same authors describe how the demands of many different types of vulnerable and displaced communities are being pursued as judicial claims thanks to the opportunities opened up by the recognition of economic and social rights. 4. It is true that, in recent years, the process of including economic and social rights in constitutional provisions has proceeded apace, courts in a range of countries have generated some valuable case law, the Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights has been adopted and some final Views have already been issued, special procedures have been created to deal with many of the economic, social and cultural rights, and international human rights bodies have devoted far more time to 1 2 3 4 4 The Special Rapporteur is very grateful to Christiaan van Veen and Varindarjit Singh for their excellent assistance with the report and to Gráinne de Búrca, Sandra Liebenberg and Nikki Reisch for their comments. Jean-Marie Guéhenno, The Fog of Peace: A Memoir of International Peacekeeping in the 21st Century (Washington, D.C., Brookings Institution Press, 2015), p. xiv. The present report focuses specifically on economic and social rights. While cultural rights are closely related to economic and social rights and are covered under the same Covenant, they also have a number of distinctive characteristics that warrant a somewhat different approach than the one adopted here. Daniel M. Brinks, Varun Gauri and Kyle Shen, “Social rights constitutionalism: negotiating the tension between the universal and the particular”, Annual Review of Law and Social Science, vol. 11 (November 2015), pp. 289-290.