Third Generation: The Solidarity Rights

In one line

Solidarity rights are held by peoples rather than individuals, require collective action rather than State abstention or provision, and have declarations and regional instruments rather than a global treaty, which is both their distinctive contribution and their central weakness.

The six claims

Self-determination sits awkwardly among them. It is collective in the same way, but it is article 1 of both Covenants, so it is a binding treaty right, which none of the six is. A candidate should mention it and mark the difference rather than folding it in.

What makes them a distinct category

The holder is a collectivity. The right to development is held by "every human person and all peoples". The right to peace is held by "the peoples of our planet". Individual claims can be derived, but the entitlement is stated for a group.

The duty-bearer is everyone. Not the territorial State alone but the international community, which is why [The Universal Declaration: Articles 28 to 30] identified article 28 as their textual origin: an entitlement to a social and international order.

Realisation requires joint action. No State can deliver peace, a stable climate or a fair international economic order alone. This is a fact about the subject-matter and not a defect in the drafting.

And they are the claims of the decolonised world. [The New International Economic Order] and [The Right to Development as the Third World Claim] show that these rights were pressed by newly independent States in the 1960s and 1970s, against the resistance of the industrialised ones. Their contested status is inseparable from that history.

The case for them

They name real harms the first two generations cannot state. A person displaced by rising seas has suffered a wrong that no article of either Covenant fits. A population impoverished by terms of trade has no individual respondent to sue.

They correct a structural asymmetry. The first two generations locate every duty in the State where the victim lives, which places the entire burden on the poorest States and none on the international arrangements that constrain them.

They have textual roots, not just aspiration. Article 28 of the Declaration, article 1 of both Covenants, article 55 of the Charter and the whole of the Right to Development Declaration.