Part V Rights and Freedoms, B Rights and Freedoms under the Charter, Ch.40 Social and Economic Rights

Author(s):  
Jackman Martha ◽  
Porter Bruce

This chapter examines the status of socio-economic rights in Canada and the competing constitutional visions that confront Canadian courts in this area. The chapter presents the historical context and legislative history of the Canadian Charter as a source of socio-economic rights protection. It describes the Supreme Court’s approach to the Charter in light of Canada’s international human rights obligations and considers sections 7 and 15 with specific reference to the positive versus negative rights debate to which social and economic rights claims have frequently given rise. The chapter discusses recent challenges in two of the most active areas of current socio-economic rights litigation in Canada: housing and health. The chapter concludes by referring to the recommendations of the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights for resolving the opposing paradigms that characterize this important area of constitutional rights.

2001 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alice Bloch

Convention status accords refugees social and economic rights and security of residence in European countries of asylum. However, the trend in Europe has been to prevent asylum seekers reaching its borders, to reduce the rights of asylum seekers in countries of asylum and to use temporary protection as a means of circumventing the responsibility of long-term resettlement. This paper will provide a case study of the United Kingdom. It will examine the social and economic rights afforded to different statuses in the areas of social security, housing, employment and family reunion. It will explore the interaction of social and economic rights and security of residence on the experiences of those seeking protection. Drawing on responses to the crisis in Kosovo and on data from a survey of 180 refugees and asylum seekers in London it will show the importance of Convention status and the rights and security the status brings.


Author(s):  
Akeel Bilgrami

Jawaharlal Nehru and Mohandas Gandhi shared the view that India’s nationalism made secularism unnecessary, for secularism is a notion whose conceptual genealogy is in a specific historical context, an idea designed to repair the damaging effects of European nation-state formation. An alternative Indian nationalism was to consist in a reconstruction of what they took to be India’s unselfconsciously pluralist traditions; the genuine and lived pluralism of ordinary Indian social life was to be replayed in the political arena of anti-imperialism. Secularism, both in Europe and post-Independence India, consists not in neutrality among religions but in a lexicographical ordering between the commitments to freedom of religion and to fundamental constitutional rights. The exception granted by the Indian state to Muslim personal law ought not to be seen as a denial of secularism but as a suspension of the secular ideal in the context of the history of a collective human subject.


2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-180
Author(s):  
Nataša Vampelj Suhadolnik

Abstract This article addresses the practices of collecting Chinese objects that were brought to the territory of present-day Slovenia by sailors, missionaries, travellers, and others who travelled to China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At the time, this territory was a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; we will, therefore, begin with the brief historical context of the Empire and its contact with China, followed by a discussion on the nature of collecting Chinese objects in Slovenian territories at that time. We will further examine the status of the individuals who travelled to China and the nature and extent of the objects they brought back. The article will also highlight the specific position of the Slovenian territory within the history of Euro-Asian cultural connections, and address the relevant issues—locally and globally—of the relationship between the centres and peripheries with regard to collecting practices.


2020 ◽  
Vol 119 (2) ◽  
pp. 301-324
Author(s):  
Shiri Pasternak

The history of colonialism in Canada has meant both the partition of Indigenous peoples from participating (physically, politically, legally) in the economy and a relentless demand to become assimilated as liberal capitalist citizens. Assimilation and segregation are both tendencies of colonization that protect the interests of white capital. But their respective prevalence seems to depend on the regime of racial capitalism at play. This paper examines the intersection of settler colonization and racial capitalism to shed light on the status of Indigenous economic rights in Canada. I ask, to what extent are Indigenous peoples understood to have economic rights—defined here as the governing authority to manage their lands and resources—and, how we can we analyze these rights to better understand the conjoined meanings of colonialism and capitalism as systems of power today? In this paper, I look at two sites to address this problem: first, I examine how the Supreme Court of Canada has defined the “Aboriginal right” to commercial economies since the patriation of Aboriginal rights into the Constitution in 1982; and, second, I examine how these rights are configured through state resource revenue-sharing schemes with First Nations, in particular from extractive projects, over the past few years. Each case study provides critical material for analyzing the economic opportunities available to First Nations through democratic channels of state “recognition,” as well as when and why tensions between state policies of segregation and assimilation emerge.


2011 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 387-411 ◽  
Author(s):  
Malcolm Langford ◽  
Ananda Mohan Bhattarai

AbstractIn Nepal, poverty is highly correlated with an individual's ethnicity, caste, language, religion or membership in an indigenous group. In the drafting of the new Constitution, many have called for inclusion of socio-economic and affirmative action rights in order to address social inequalities. This article sets out to assess these demands in an international and domestic context. After this socio-political background is set out in the introduction, section 2 provides a comparative and international analysis of the debates, trends and jurisprudence concerning the constitutional inclusion of equality and socio-economic rights. Section 3 examines the constitutional history of Nepal on this topic with a particular focus on the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court, and section 4 assesses the consequences of this experience for the constitutional drafting process. Section 5 analyses the current draft bill of rights and provides some thoughts on the possible future directions for the constitutional drafting and jurisprudential responses.


Author(s):  
Vladimir Il'ich Shubin

This article is dedicated to examination of the history of emergence of Greek mercenaries during the riling time of XXVI Sais Dynasty. The author reviews the status and role of Greek mercenaries in the armed forced of Sais rulers, organization of their service and living conditions. Considering the fact that the use of Greek mercenaries in Egypt army was a part of the traditional policy of Sais rulers and carried mass character, the author refers to the problem  of social origin of the phenomenon of mercenarism in the Greek society of Archaic era. The research applies comparative-historical method that allows viewing the phenomenon of mercenarism in the historical context – based on the comparative data analysis of ancient written tradition. By the time of Sais Dynasty, control over regions that traditionally provided mercenaries to the Egypt army was lost. Under the circumstances, in order to compensate such losses, Egypt conscripted into military service the hailed from the Greek world. Mercenaries became the first Greeks settled on the Egyptian land. The conclusion is made that the Greek colonization, in absence of other ways to enter the formerly closed to the Greeks Egypt, at its initial stage manifested in such distinct form.


2021 ◽  
pp. 191-201
Author(s):  
Axel Tschentscher

This chapter argues that apex courts should not take the place of the legislative or the executive branch. It takes a critical stance towards the notion of optimization that legal principles entail. Optimization results in judicial activism that, in turn, shifts the power from politics to courts. The chapter then looks at some decisions by the German Federal Constitutional Court considered 'activist decisions' in the realm of socio-economic rights, and compares their follow-up with the Colombian experience. It suggests that judges must play a rather modest role and limit themselves to a case-by-case rationale even if social rights are systematically under-enforced. The chapter also calls the courts' attention to be aware of the financial restrictions of their countries. Finally, it asks courts to create incentives for the legislatures and executive branch to commit with social and economic rights, and insists that follow-up measures should not be taken by apex courts, but rather by the political branches.


Author(s):  
Claire Fenton-Glynn

This chapter focuses on four social and economic rights which have been invoked in relation to children before the European Court of Human Rights: the right to health care, the right to a healthy environment, the right to property, and the right to social welfare. In relation to health care, it considers issues concerning consent to treatment, immunisation and disease prevention, privacy, and medical negligence. The chapter then examines the issue of abortion, focusing on the status of the unborn children under the Convention, as well as the right to effective access to treatment. The right to a healthy environment is also analysed, although this issue has only been briefly considered in the context of children’s rights. Finally, the child’s right to property, in the context of misuse of property, inheritance rights, and child maintenance are considered, as well as social security and social welfare, including parental leave and allowances, and access to state benefits.


2012 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jørn Hansen ◽  
Thomas Skovgaard

This article takes a closer look at both the historical context and the political and economic orchestration of the Olympic Games in London – 1908, 1948 and 2012. By comparing the three events, a number of differences and game specific circumstances are demonstrated. On this basis the article concludes with a discussion of the status of the three London Games within the overall history of the Modern Olympics.


2013 ◽  
Vol 41 (2/3) ◽  
pp. 339-354
Author(s):  
Remo Gramigna

This paper seeks to shed light on an unwritten chapter in the history of Tartu semiotics, that is, to draw a parallel between Juri Lotman and Émile Benveniste on the status of natural language among other systems of signs. The tenet that language works as a ‘primary modelling system’ represents one of the trademarks of the Tartu-Moscow school. For Lotman, the primacy assigned to natural language in respect to other systems of signs lied in the fact that the former functions as a ‘model’ for the latter thus regarded as ‘secondary modelling systems’. Yet how does language carry out its function of being a model for other sign systems? Is language the only primary modelling system? This paper seeks to foster the abovementioned claim of the primacy of natural language and argues that this issue deserves a closer inspection. In order to follow this route, it suggests a parallel between Lotman and Benveniste arguing that there exist several points in common that lead to a convergence of positions between these two remarkable scholars. The paper explores such a possibility, arguing that Lotman’s and Benveniste’s positions open up an interesting debate with specific reference to the relations laid down between language and other system of signs.


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