A/HRC/19/42 the Asset Recovery Watch database, the requesting country is a developing one. Out of these requests, 83 per cent were addressed to members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and 17 per cent to other developing countries, most of which were offshore financial centres. 15. Legal barriers are exacerbated by factual and institutional obstacles; the most salient being the lack of will to cooperate. Requested jurisdictions, especially financial centres, “often maintain an unresponsive and inefficient mutual legal assistance regime and systems that are known to be arduous, discouraging states from submitting requests for assistance”, prioritize domestic cases over foreign requests and rarely take a proactive approach, even though they do have the expertise, capacities or resources to provide better assistance. It has been suggested that this institutional behavior is reinforced by the perception that “some requests from developing jurisdictions are submitted simply as a ’smoke screen’, contrived for domestic and international political reasons in a case that would never be seriously prosecuted”, and that “developing jurisdictions do not always respond positively when developed countries inform them of the discovery of assets believed to be illegally obtained”.16 16. While this perception might sometimes be correct, there are cases where there is a failure in adequately distinguishing between the State authorities and the society suffering the consequences of corruption. When this distinction has been taken into account, a more proactive intervention of the requested State was able to unbalance the field in favor of seriously prosecuting cases.17 C. The legal framework for the realization of human rights in the context of the asset-recovery process 17. The international human rights framework primarily establishes the relationship between individuals and States in terms of rights and duties. Typically, the human person is identified as a rights-holder, while States are duty-bearers. The Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights describes the specific obligations of States as the responsibility to respect, protect and fulfil human rights. 18. The nature of States’ human rights obligations has been debated at length, particularly their alleged differential nature with regards to civil and political rights, on the one hand, and economic, social, and cultural rights on the other. 19. It has been recognized that all human rights and fundamental freedoms are indivisible and interdependent, and that equal attention and urgent consideration should be given to the implementation, promotion and protection of all civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights, that States have the duty to respect, protect, and fulfill all human rights, comprising both negative and positive duties. 18 20. The Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights has stressed that the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights establishes obligations of both conduct and result, and that “while the Covenant provides for progressive realization and acknowledges the constraints due to the limits of available resources, it also imposes 16 17 18 6 Ibid., pp. 25-26. Tim Daniels and James Maton, “The kleptocrat’s portfolio decision”, in Peter Reuter (ed.) Draining Development: Controlling the Flow of Illicit Funds from Developing Countries (World Bank Press, 2012). E/C.12/1999/5, paras. 15 and 46; E/C.12/2000/4, paras. 33 and 39.