Poverty and inequality are so pervasive and widespread that they can seem like an inevitable tragedy. The sheer scale of deprivation and the difficulty of identifying who is to blame can leave us passive, helpless and resigned. Yet poverty--understood as the lack of an adequate standard of living and the capacity to live a life with dignity--is not "natural." It is the result of actions or omissions by political leaders and other powerful decision-makers at the national and international level. Its persistence depends on the policy decisions taken by identifiable individuals and institutions with the power to decide how many children will survive to the age of five, how many will go to bed hungry and how many will receive a basic education.

"Each State Party to the present Covenant undertakes to take steps, individually and through international assistance and co-operation, especially economic and technical, to the maximum of its available resources, with a view to achieving progressively the full realization of the rights recognized in the present Covenant by all appropriate means, including particularly the adoption of legislative measures." --International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, Article 2(1).

Although governments across the world over have committed to progressively realizing economic and social rights, these commitments will only become a reality when governments are held accountable, both politically and legally, for their failure to address patterns of preventable deprivation.

Sometimes this failure is glaring, particularly where deprivation results from abusive or negligent actions or omissions by officials such as evicting people arbitrarily (a breach of the duty to respect rights) or doing nothing when parents prevent girls from going to school (a breach of the duty to protect). More often, however, poverty and inequality result from a failure to create the conditions in which people can access their rights. In such cases, the responsibility to fulfill economic and social rights can be more difficult to pin down.

Effective monitoring is essential for making human rights meaningful and for ensuring accountability when laws and policies create, perpetuate or exacerbate deprivations of economic and social rights. However, establishing that such policy failures amount to a violation of the obligation to fulfill economic and social rights can be challenging. The rights enshrined in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights are subject to "progressive realization," according to a state’s "maximum available resources." The conditionality of this language, combined with complexity of public policy, make it difficult to trace patterns of preventable rights deprivations back to policy failures.

Over the past decade, there has been growing recognition that a "violations" approach to human rights monitoring—historically centered on civil and political rights—must be expanded on in order to fully assess economic and social rights. Great advances have been made within the human rights community to develop and adapt innovative tools and techniques for use in monitoring economic and social rights fulfillment.

CESR has been at the forefront of efforts to forge new ground in measuring and monitoring compliance to states' obligations to fulfill economic and social rights. We believe that human rights monitoring can serve as a powerful advocacy tool for social justice. For this reason, we work to provide civil society organizations, NGOs, national human rights insitutions and other advocates with practical and accessible resources and publications on how to utilize multidisciplinary tools to better monitor the realization of economic, social and cultural and demand accountability for denials and violations of these rights.