Description of the French platform for ESC rights

Friday 26 March 2010 by Alexandra Aubry, Plateforme DESC France

Leading organizations: Terre des Hommes and The Human Rights League (Ligue des droits de l’Homme)

Platform members: the ESC Rights platform gathers 56 international solidarity organizations, NGOs, networks and trade unions.

Creation date: the Research and Information Centre for Development (Centre de Recherche et d’Information pour le Développement - CRID) study group on the ESC Rights was created in 2002. It expanded to become a platform in 2007.

Goals:

To present alternative/shadow reports on the ESC rights status
To lead advocacy for the signature and ratification of the Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR).
To monitor the United Nations’ Committee on ESC Rights’ recommendations

For more information:

Contact: aa@terredeshommes.fr

The Economic, Social and Cultural Rights or “ESC Rights” are a set of rights that covers various fundamental human needs, such as the right to housing, to food, to decent work and wages, to education and professional training, to live in a decent environment, to health care, to use one’s native language, etc. Those rights are recognized by the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural rights (ICESCR), implemented in 1976.

In 2002, the CRID set up a study group on ESC Rights in order to coordinate the actions of its members and of various partners working on this topic (such as Trade Unions, Human Rights Organizations…), with the purpose to run advocacy for the drafting and the adoption of an Optional Protocol to the ICESCR.

We had to wait until December 10th, 2008 for the Optional protocol to be adopted by the U.N General Assembly. This adoption marks an historic step forward for Human Rights. This protocol will enable individuals or groups of individuals, whose rights have been violated, to obtain justice on an international level, by appealing for review to the UN Committee on ESC rights (Committee composed by independent experts monitoring the ICESCR implementation by its States parties).

The protocol is also planning an investigation system which should give the Committee the opportunity to visit the involved country in order to check on the specified allegations, but only if the Committee is informed that the country is strongly violating the rights recognized in the Covenant. Moreover, the protocol should help to support initiatives striving for the promotion and observance of ESC Rights, by national laws and before the courts.

To date, 31 states have signed the Optional protocol. France has supported the protocol drafting. As part of the ICESCR, France has already committed itself to implement those rights, yet it is not part of the Optional Protocol’s signatory States.

In 2007, the CRID study group on ESC Rights started the drafting of a shadow report on ESC Rights. It was an answer to the French government’s report submitted for the recurrent examination session on the ESC Rights’ implementation in France led by the Committee on ESC Rights.

As a consequence, the study group expanded to become a platform in order to fulfill this shadow report and prove the infringements of the ESC Rights but also to enhance the necessity to implement their effectiveness and their “justiciability”.

The shadow report, introduced on April 29th 2008 to the Committee on ESC Rights was a great success: indeed most of the report’s recommendations have been taken up in the Concluding Observations sent to France by the Committee on ESC rights.

The ESC rights platform has also created pedagogical materials available on the website: www.rinoceros.org and organized a conference in September 2009 on the following theme: “the stakes of the ESC rights in a crisis context”.

In 2010, the ESC Rights platform continues its advocacy work with the Ministries, in order to ask for the signature and ratification of the Optional Protocol to the ICESCR, as well as the monitoring of the Committee on ESC Rights’ recommendations. The platform should also start drafting a new shadow report.

Published in the CRID information letter n°77 (in French).