The central questions that this chapter addresses are as follows: what is the conceptual status that human rights activism allots to social and economic rights, and what is the status that activism should allot to these rights, and why? These questions are significant because traditionally liberal democratic theory, which arguably inspires and sustains the activities of human rights INGOs, has been preoccupied with two sets of concerns: how to best safeguard human life and liberty. These concerns have been, throughout history, protected through codification of the right to life, the right to physical integrity, and the right to freedom. Correspondingly, because the best way of shielding these rights is to ensure the right to voice, or ensure the right to political participation and freedom of expression, political rights have emerged as concomitants of civil rights. Social and economic rights such as the right to livelihood, health, nutrition, and education, or the right not to eke out a living in conditions that prove highly detrimental to human dignity, have been, at least until recently, treated by liberal democratic theory and human rights INGOs much as poor cousins are treated in extended families – as hangers on at worst and as inconvenient necessities at best.

There was of course a time when the socialist tradition asserted the primacy of social and economic rights. That time passed when in the late 1980s communist states collapsed at the very moment civil societies in Eastern and Central Europe mobilized to demand civil and political rights.