The United States and human rights

Extract

These excellent books mark the reception in American thinking of the doctrine that economic and social rights (Shue, Brown/Maclean, Hoffmann, Vogelgesang, Falk) are at least as important as the civil and political rights of Henkin's ‘International Bill of Rights’. The English contribution to this literature, the collection of documents edited by Brownlie, makes no distinction between sets of rights; and by reprinting work by Prebisch and Figueres, Brownlie promotes the thesis that development and human rights go together. However, it is worth noticing that all these authors ignore the efforts by the majority of countries in the UN General Assembly and the Commission on Human Rights to assert the related concept of rights to development, notably in GA Resolution 32/130 (1977).