Hillary Endorses Economic Human Rights

Courtesy of our Social Entrepreneurship blog, I see that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton voiced support for economic human rights (EHR) in a recent Wall Street Journal interview.  Following on her trip to Africa, and responding to the US attempts to promote human rights (HR) in Africa, SOS Clinton answers:

...I also think that it's important to look at human rights more broadly than it has been defined. Human rights are also the right to a good job and shelter over your head and a chance to send your kids to school and get health care when your wife is pregnant. It's a much broader agenda. Too often it has gotten narrowed to our detriment."

Nice! I wonder: does this reflect a governing ideology in the Obama Administration?

To me, a newcomer to the field of economic human rights, which mandates that governments and societies have a positive responsibility to fight poverty through fulfilling individuals' rights to housing, education, and work (among others), this is a tremendous statement from a key member of the Obama Administration.  Remember when Obama said during one of the Presidential debates that healthcare is a human right?  If this rhetoric reflects a fundamental ideology of this Administration, we may actually get somewhere in our anti-poverty efforts.

Social Entrepreneurship blogger Nathaniel links to noted development economist William Easterly, who chastises Clinton's statement as embracing a "fuzzy" notion of HR. His contention is that housing, healthcare, etc. are entitlements, and that redefining them as rights distracts us from enforcing political and civil rights.

It seems his rejection of economic human rights is based on established definitions of what constitutes a right and who represents a rights violator and the violated.  But why does this preclude us from expanded, reconstituted definitions of human rights and their violators?  We have the data on chronic, persistent poverty.  We have the data on socio-economic neighborhood and employment segregation.  We know the institutional roots of these patterns.  What's preventing us from tackling these inequalities under the rubric that all individuals have a right to secure housing, work, and education?

It sounds like a problem of political will to me.

(US State Dept. Photo of SOS Clinton and NY Rep. Nita Lowey visiting with people from South Africa's Victoria Mxenge Housing Development.  South Africa's constitution enshrines the right to housing.)