Pursuing global socio-economic, colonial and environmental justice through economic redistribution: the potential significance of human rights treaty obligations

Abstract

As far as the global realization of social rights are concerned, three central interrelated challenges are commonly raised: (1) ‘economic inequality’: the global distribution of wealth and resources should be reconceived in order to promote the social rights of people in the Global South; (2): ‘colonial justice’: there has to be a reckoning for the injustice of colonialism; (3),‘environmental justice’: ‘industrialized’ countries, whose economic privileges are rooted in environmental harm and exploitation generally, and climate-altering carbon use in particular, owe a debt to the people in the world who have been and are at the sharp end of much of this harm and exploitation. This chapter explores the potential for international human rights treaties covering social rights to be interpreted extraterritorially, and within this, to encompass obligations that would involve economic transfers from the economically privileged to the economically less privileged parts of the world, thereby implicating the foregoing challenges.