Development of international legal standards in the field of economic and social human rights: Historical and legal analysis in the context of scientific discussion in the journal “Human Rights Quarterly”

Abstract

The relevance of the study is conditioned by the lack of scientific consensus on the legal content and possible ways to implement social and economic human rights and the intensification of discussions around them in scientific and public discourse. The purpose of the study is a historical and legal analysis of the process of development of international legal standards in the field of economic and social human rights, options for their rationing in the text of international treaties that were developed based on the results of discussions in the late 1940s-early 1950s. The study involved archival materials of meetings of the Third Committee of the UN General Assembly and the Commission on Human Rights, which was based on the use of a set of methods of qualitative and quantitative analysis, synthesis, and a comparative legal method. The conducted research gave grounds to come to several reasoned conclusions. On the one hand, the analysis of individual papers and fairly broad scientific discussions helped to identify several main conceptual approaches to understanding the processes of developing and consolidating the most important legal norms that are aimed at regulating the sphere of economic and social human rights at the international level. On the other hand, based on a study of the protocols of meetings of both the Third Committee of the UN General Assembly and the Commission on Human Rights, it was established that the process of developing and adopting framework international covenants, which aimed to consolidate fundamental, legally binding norms of law, went through different stages and covered different conceptual approaches of participants in this process. Given the analysis of modern studies on the subject matter, the prerequisites and components of the process of development of international legal standards in the field of economic and social human rights which regulate it to this day were identified. The findings are of value primarily for other scientific developments devoted to the field of human rights, but they can also be applied in the process of law-making in accordance with the field of law