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The Rights Of The United States

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Introduction. The ICESCR was signed in 1966 and came into force in 1976. It provides for a bunch of economic social and cultural rights amongst which is the right to health. The rights in the Covenant were for a long being considered as ‘vague’ and therefore unjusticiable. This was as a result of the fact that state party obligations under article 2(1) of the Covenant were not of immediate effect. They were instead subject to progressive realization subject to the availability of resources. The issue of allege ‘vagueness’ became increasingly swept away thanks to the heavy influence of the CESCR and other Treaty Bodies through General Comments and Recommendations, reports by Special Rapporteurs and other Special Procedures, academics …show more content…

The issue of justiciability has finally been laid to rest with the adoption of the Optional Protocol (OP) on the ICESCR by the United Nations General Assembly. The OP empowers the committee to handle individual and collective complaints, state-to-state complaints, and initiate inquiries for allege violations. With these arguments well settled, attention has now been shifted from judicial application to non-judicial application and accountability for ESCR – what can pretty much be referred to as the policy approach. This essay is going to look at the strength and weaknesses of both the judicial and policy approaches to the implementation of the right to the highest attainable standard of health, and then subsequently draw a conclusion which will show a need to integrate these two approaches as they complement each other. Judicial Approach to ESCR As already seen, it involves taking judicial and quasi-judicial approaches to implement ESCR. This approach is hard core and is mostly used by lawyers who (for efficiency purposes) must first determine whether the state in question has a monist or a dualist system. A monist system means the international law makes up part of the national law while a dualist system means both international and national law operate side-by-side. Notwithstanding the system in the state, this approach has its

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