Everyday there is more news about alarming disparities in income and wealth from around the world. One day we learn that the CEO of Disney earned 1,424 times what the median worker in that company earned (Stanley-Becker 2019). The next it is the impact of COVID-19 on billionaires self-quarantining on their private yachts versus workers carrying out essential services without paid sick leave and often for less than a living wage (Collins 2020). The portrait of glaring inequality and injustice described in the daily news is profoundly disturbing. It is also a stark contrast to the vision of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a commitment of all UN members to respect and promote all human rights – civil, political, economic, social and cultural – for all. Deep concern about extreme and growing economic inequalities have led some human rights scholars and practitioners to ask what role, if any, human rights has played in contesting such inequalities or could play in reversing this four-decade trend (Alston 2015; Alston and Reisch 2019; Balakrishnan, Heintz and Elson 2016; Brinks, Dehm and Engle 2019; CESR 2016; MacNaughton and Frey 2018; Moyn 2018)? What international human rights norms and standards address economic inequality, and what guidelines can be drawn from emerging work of the UN human rights mechanisms, scholarship and practice on human rights and economic inequalities?

Since the 1980s much of the world has experienced sharp and steadily rising economic inequality (Berg 2015, 3). The cause of economic inequality’s ascendance is not a mystery. Rising inequality is a result of specific policies that enable top income earners and the wealthy to capture greater and greater shares of income and wealth (Atkinson 2015, 76; Chancel, Hough and Voituriez 2018, 8). Inequality enhancing policies include regressive income, inheritance and capital gains taxes that effectively help high income and wealthy individuals and families to preserve and build their high incomes and wealth. Rising inequality also results from policies to prevent lower wealth and income individuals and families from claiming a greater portion of income, wealth and power. These inequality enhancing policies include laws that make it more difficult for workers to organize labor unions, to engage in collective bargaining and to influence policies (Alquist 2017).

Economic inequalities are among the greatest human rights challenges the world faces today. Over the past four decades of neoliberal policy dominance, economic inequalities have risen drastically in the vast majority of countries in the world (Alvaredo et al. 2018, 9; Harvey 2005). Over the same period, international human rights have risen to the become the primary ethical language and legal framework for justice. This Upendra Baxi labels the “Age of Human Rights” (Baxi 2012, 1). The trend of rising economic inequalities in the age of human rights is not, however, inevitable. In 1948, when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was adopted, the human rights agenda encompassed the ideal of equality, which coincided with the growing welfare state and the decolonization and “modernization” of low- and middle-income countries (Marshall 1992 Moyn 2018; Dehm 2019). Today, extreme economic inequalities and their myriad negative impacts on human wellbeing provide compelling reasons to consider the potential of human rights to once again contribute to bring about a more economically equal and just world. This volume takes up that challenge.