Social Rights Language. A Comparative Analysis Between EU Law, International Law and Comparative Law

This paper aims at emphasizing the importance of treating economic and, more importantly, social rights as human rights, rather than as desirable goals, development challenges or social justice concerns. In this respect, the global language of human rights, and of social and economic rights in particular, has permeated progressive politics throughout the world over the last centuries. A voluminous academic literature has dealt with the growing importance of social rights language both in constitutional texts and in the politics of social provisions and human security. But, despite its global origins, universal social rights language has gone through a process of so-called “vernacularization” (Merry, 2006; Brinks et al, 2015; Alston 2017), through which it has transformed and has been transformed by local politics. Such a process can be read as one more instance of the tension between the particularism of domestic constitutions and their appeal to universal principles (Jacobsohn, 2010).