On February 21-22 of this year, the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights conducted its seventh periodic review of Sweden.
The International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), adopted in 1966 and ratified by Sweden in 1971, incorporates only a portion of the rights articulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights from 1948. Nevertheless, the covenant is renowned for its scope and complexity. The rights we now classify as economic, social, and cultural encompass the right to self-determination, rights associated with employment and safe working conditions, trade union rights, the right to social protection, family support, the right to an adequate standard of living (including food, clothing and housing), the right to health, the right to education, as well as cultural rights (including academic freedom and the right to engage in one’s country’s cultural life).
The recommendations for Sweden issued by the UN Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights in early March cover most of these areas. They include topics like climate policy, development assistance, the rights for gig workers, access to basic public services for asylum seekers and irregular migrants, decriminalization of drug use, discrimination and harassment in schools, the repatriation of Sami human remains and cultural artifacts, and much more.
The Committee particularly emphasizes three areas where it expects Sweden to submit additional information within two years. First, it calls for the complete implementation of the new consultation law for the Sami people in Sweden, ensuring compliance with international standards for free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC). Second, it expects measures to address labor exploitation, including effective protection against violence and harassment for migrant workers and their families. Finally, it requests Sweden to ensure that social insurance programs, such as unemployment benefits and daily allowances for asylum seekers, are sufficient to safeguard the right to an adequate standard of living.
In my job at the Swedish Institute for Human Rights, I had the privilege of participating in drafting our alternative report to the Committee and attending the review in Geneva. Our report highlights, among other things, a survey we published in 2023, which showed that economic, social, and cultural rights are relatively unknown in Sweden. Few people know what these rights entail in practice and how they can be enforced. Just like the joint submission by civil society organizations, we also criticize Sweden’s reluctance to ratify the third optional protocol that provides an individual complaint mechanism to the Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, a reluctance we believe stems from an outdated view of economic, social, and cultural rights as policy declarations and objectives rather than actual rights.
Working on the report served as a stark reminder of how rights, which have been central to the international human rights collaboration since the 1940s, remain relatively unknown and unfulfilled in a country that often prides itself on being a pioneer in realizing rights. It was a first-hand encounter with what some scholars refer to as “the Nordic human rights paradox.” Yet it was also an experience that prompted me to reflect critically on my own education and teaching, and to what extent I had given these rights the attention they deserve.
I took my first course in interdisciplinary human rights studies at Lund University in the fall of 2006. After completing my Master’s and PhD degrees in Lund and a postdoctoral fellowship based in Uppsala, I had the privilege of teaching at the bachelor’s and master’s programs in human rights and democracy at University College Stockholm, the institution that in the mid-1990s was the first to establish specialized human rights education at the university level in Sweden.
I have always cherished being in these interdisciplinary environments where legal, philosophical, political science, sociological, theological, and historical perspectives are combined and contrasted, with the aim of understanding the conditions necessary for human rights to be meaningful and actualized, as well as to comprehend the dynamics in situations where they are undermined, or as is more often the case, realized—but not fully and not for everyone.
During my undergraduate studies, we did engage with the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), grappling with the difficulties of interpreting maximalist concepts like the right to the highest attainable standard of health, and the challenges of applying the idea of the progressive realization of rights. However, more complex and somewhat more mundane issues such as access to education, adequate health care, trade union rights, and the right to safe and adequate working conditions were generally pushed to the side in favor of more eye-catching cases of gross violations, including historic and contemporary examples of racial segregation, torture, crimes against humanity, and genocide. My education was essentially about violence.
Later, when teaching students at various levels about human rights, a select set of issues concerning economic, social, and cultural rights became important to me. I did my best to introduce students to the debate on the relationship between human rights and social and economic inequality that flourished in the late 2010s, much due to great books by Samuel Moyn and Jessica Whyte. While they didn’t agree among themselves, they all stressed the limits of rights-based politics during times of accelerated global warming, increasing inequalities, and the dismantling of universal welfare systems. Or as I put the question to my students: Why care about reforms to protect individual rights in a burning and unequal world?
The problem is that discussions about the general relationship between human rights and economic inequality tend to be abstract and disconnected from the concrete challenges related to specific rights, such as the right to health, education and housing. They are intriguing for scholars who like big ideas but offer little guidance to practitioners. It’s telling that the debates on human rights and inequality rarely take into account the resources available within international human rights law to address social stratification and discrimination within sectors like education, employment, and healthcare. The resources within the actual human rights systems are overlooked in order to point to the shortcomings of human rights discourse.
Following the CESCR Committee’s review also gave me an opportunity to critically reflect on some of the arguments developed within political philosophy to explain the basis for the existence of rights. A textbook I read as an undergraduate and later tortured my students with is James Nickel’s classic “Making Sense of Human Rights”. Nickel defends a limited understanding of economic, social, and cultural rights. The argument is that these rights are essential for people to enjoy basic needs for a minimally decent life but also to enjoy other—purportedly more central—rights, such as freedom of speech and freedom of assembly.
This type of “linkage arguments” are somewhat in line with the thesis of the indivisibility and interdependence of rights. But it has struck me how attempts to give human rights moral and political grounding within political philosophy are often based on an implicit understanding of civil and political rights as more fundamental than other rights. Linkage arguments often depart from an idea that civil and political rights are inherently good, whereas social, economic and cultural rights can be justified because of the work they do, because they support the good.
This implicit division between different categories of rights is why the work initiated by scholars like Steven L. B. Jensen and Charles Walton to dissect the histories of economic, social, and cultural rights is so necessary. By pointing to the deep history of some of the rights contained in the ICESCR, and by exposing how the division between civil and political rights and social, economic, and cultural rights itself is a product of a very specific historical moment, they challenge us to reassess perceptions that are more or less established among both human rights scholars and practitioners.
For those of us teaching human rights from a philosophical, political, and legal perspective, it becomes an important challenge not to take division between broad categories of rights too seriously, especially when the division is associated with a corresponding notion of which rights are ‘real’ rights and which are a rendered as mere supporting structures or abstract goals.
Linde Lindkvist
Linde Lindkvist is a Senior Advisor at the Swedish Institute for Human Rights as well as Visiting Research Fellow and Adjunct Senior Lecturer in Human Rights Studies at Lund University. Lindkvist specializes in questions of human rights history, the right to religious freedom and children’s rights. His recent research and publications concern the political origins of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989).
