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Optional protocol to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights
The optional Protocol relating to the International Covenant on the Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) of the United Nations (1966) was adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on December 10th, 2008. In International Law, the ESCR belongs to all human rights in the same way and to same rank as civil and political rights which, themselves, already had benefited from an optional protocol of this type becoming effective on the 23rd of March 1976.
All citizens of the countries who will ratify this protocol will be granted the opportunity to contact the Economic, Social and Cultural Rights’ Committee of the United Nations so that is studied, after due hearing of the parties, violations of the rights enshrined in the Covenant on economical, social and cultural rights, after having used all the different ways of internal appealings (depending on cases: judicial process, mediation, submission for an out of-court settlement,).
So, the justiciability of the rights to food, to work, to health, to education, to housing,to culture, for men/women equality, for a decent life and human dignity… are considerably strengthened.
To achieve this result, many efforts had been necessary. France held an important role in the adoption of this optional protocol and in particular the city of Nantes- which welcomes every two years the World Forum of Human Rights. Indeed, it is necessary to remember that in September 2005, the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs organized in Nantes, with the moral and financial support of Nantes Métropole, an international high-level seminary on the justiciability of the ESCR. This seminary took place at the international convention center of Nantes Métropole on the impulse of Michel Doucin, who was the French ambassador for human rights at that time (current member of the executive board and scientific commission of the permanent Secretariat based in Nantes / SPIDH).
Hundred of international experts had participated in this high-level meeting which stake was to identify, the main obstacles of the writing of an additional Protocol Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in order to rise them better rand make them effective. The reports of this meeting, called the Consensus of Nantes, then became a reference. This meeting had allowed to shape the core of the compromise between States – European ones in particular-, and then the process of adoption considerably boosted.
Catarina de Albuberque, president-reporter of the workgroup of the Human Rights Council of the United Nations, to whom we mainly owe the success of this adoption, was at the last World Forum on Human Rights in Nantes, which gathered during four days, more than 2500 delegates and stakeholders coming from hundred different countries.
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