Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights Project

Collaboration with other Organizations

Latin America

Argentina: The project will work with the Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales (Center for Legal and Social Studies), better known by its acronym, CELS. CELS is an Argentine NGO based in Buenos Aires that litigates on behalf of those whose human rights, including economic, social and cultural rights, have been violated. It often brings cases that rely on international as well as domestic law. CELS relies on good monitoring data to build effective cases. The project will work informally with CELS, which will provide information on its needs and will review, test and provide feedback on the components of the system on a continuous basis as the thesaurus and standard formats are developed.

FIO/Consejo (Central and South America): The project is working in partnership with the Federación Iberoamericana de Ombudsmen (Iberian-American Federation of Ombudsmen) or FIO, and its Central American branch, the Consejo Centroamericana de Ombudsmen (Central American Council of Ombudsmen). FIO, established in 1994, has twelve member states in Central and South America, Spain and Portugal, and serves as a forum for national ombudsmen from the member countries to share expertise, provide mutual administrative support and strengthen the culture of human rights in Latin America. Dr. Leo Valladares Lanza, the National Commissioner for Human Rights in Honduras, is currently vice-president of FIO.

The AAAS Science and Human Rights Program has worked with Dr. Valladares and the Honduran Human Rights Commission since 1995 to design and install a computerized, full text-based documentation system and a human rights violations casework and analysis system in Honduras. The project builds on this long-standing relationship, to further develop the current monitoring and documentation system to incorporate economic, social and cultural rights. This will enable the system to expand to other FIO member states, as well as other governmental and quasi-governmental organizations with an obligation to monitor economic, social and cultural rights. As a result, the ombudsmen’s offices will be able operate more effectively as human rights watchdogs within their own countries, and will benefit as well from the ability to document, support and communicate their findings using internationally accepted protocols and standards.

FIO and Consejo member organizations will serve as sites for developing and testing the thesaurus and will provide feedback on its progress. In cooperation with both organizations, the project will undertake the following activities: 1) compiling and combining existing classifications systems for economic, social and cultural rights; 2) building an Internet-accessible computer system that will host the prototype system; and 3) defining and implementing minimal requirements for the classification, exchange and reporting of economic, social and cultural rights violations. The ESCR monitoring systems of member countries will be designed to be compatible with existing monitoring systems for civil and political rights, as well as the other components of the human rights information management systems that AAAS has helped Honduras to develop. Participating countries will be linked electronically to the central network of organizations working in ESCR that the project is creating on the World Wide Web. Through links to the Web, the participating FIO members will have access to ongoing training and technical assistance, and will have the ability to add violations to the thesaurus that they encounter in their own work. As pilot sites for development of an ESCR thesaurus, these participating organizations will also receive ongoing training and technical assistance by means of periodic site visits.

South Africa

A central feature of the new South African Constitution is the unprecedented emphasis that it places on social and economic rights. Eight social and economic rights are enumerated in its Bill of Rights: the right to an environment that is not harmful to health and well-being, labor rights, and the rights to access to adequate housing, health care, food, water, social security and education. The constitution also contains a provision that requires reporting by organs of state with respect to the realization of the rights so enumerated and vests a newly established Human Rights Commission with powers "to investigate and report on the observance of human rights" and "to take steps to secure appropriate redress where human rights have been violated." To this end, the South African Human Rights Commission must submit an annual report to the Parliament on these activities.

To fulfill these obligations, the Human Rights Commission is setting up a national monitoring system. Because it is required to collect and analyze data at three levels–national, provincial, and local–and the latter includes some 6,000 separate units, the task is formidable and will require a sophisticated information management system.