A/HRC/29/31 G. Putting questions of resources and redistribution back into the human rights equation 56. The challenge of putting questions of resources and redistribution back into the human rights equation has several dimensions: (a) The nature of the obligation to ensure respect for civil and political rights has been treated all too often as implying that resource considerations are not relevant in evaluating governmental compliance with the relevant international obligations. In other words, questions of the availability of resources and equality of access to those resources were largely eliminated from the most vibrant parts of the international human rights system, and relegated instead to the minor league discussions about economic, social and cultural rights. In the latter context, ironically, they were given overwhelming importance, such that the qualification contained in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights that a State’s obligations extended only to the maximum of its available resources is often invoked to excuse basic non-compliance; (b) This artificial marginalization of questions of resources and distribution from the main human rights debates has also been reinforced by the determination of many States to keep the areas of international economics, finance and trade quarantined from human rights. The World Bank can simply refuse to engage with human rights in the context of its policies and programmes, IMF does the same, and the World Trade Organization is little different. When such issues are raised in the Human Rights Council the argument is invariably heard that it is not the appropriate forum and these matters should be dealt with elsewhere. But when efforts are made to raise human rights in such forums, the refrain is that they should rather be dealt with by the Human Rights Council; (c) Leading human rights non-governmental organizations need to overcome their deep reluctance to bring issues such as resources and the need for redistributive policies into their research and advocacy. The result of their current failure to do so is that for all of their excellent work in exposing the magnitude of a specific range of human rights violations (overwhelmingly violations of civil and political rights), the deeper structures that keep in place policies and systems that do little to address extreme poverty and do even less to address extreme inequalities are effectively left in place, and the status quo is reaffirmed. 19