Independent electoral commissions can and do play an important role in protecting and promoting the “minimum core” of electoral democracy around the globe – including by postponing or setting aside elections that cannot or have not been conducted freely and fairly, excluding candidates and parties unwilling to comply with constitutional requirements, discounting tainted or fraudulent votes, and recounting electoral tallies. But there are dark sides to these broad-ranging powers. When electoral commissions are coerced or captured by authoritarian actors, these same powers can be used to undermine the fairness and competitiveness of the electoral playing-field, rather than protecting it. Any discussion of the promise of independent electoral commissions as democratic institutions, therefore, must be counter-balanced by attention to the capacity for this very discourse to be “abusively borrowed” in a way that undermines democracy.

The 1994 Argentine constitutional reforms introduced a plethora of economic, social and cultural rights to the text of the constitution, along with innovative procedural devices for vindicating those rights. More than two decades later, we have a wealth of experience with judicial interpretation and enforcement of these rights, and civil society use of the rights to pursue complex policy goals. This chapter explores that experience and describes the ways in which certain rights – such as the right to health, housing and a healthy environment – have been enforced through judicial orders. It focuses especially on the various ways in which courts have addressed the difficult task of designing, implementing and monitoring solutions to alleged violations of rights, when those violations have complex social and economic roots and any solutions consequently require extensive and long-term state involvement.

Concerns about manageable remedies have been a major impediment to recognition of socio-economic and cultural (SEC) rights. Part I examines remedies available for SEC rights violations in supra-national and domestic courts including interim remedies, suspended declarations of invalidity and other remands to legislatures, damages, declarations and injunctions. Part II argues that individual remedies should not be rejected because of concerns that they may result in inequitable queue jumping. Part III examines the role that proportionality principles and reasonableness review can play in justifying delays and limits on SEC rights. including in emergencies. Part IV examines South African engagement remedies. Although they can result in consensual and creative agreement, they can also be used as a means to limit rights and authorize evictions. Courts should address inequality of bargaining power including through the use of interim remedies. Part V suggests that South African courts are taking a two-track approach when they combine anti-eviction remedies with more dialogic systemic remedies including engagement. The relation between individual remedies and the minimum core of SEC rights is explored, as is the importance of individual remedies in responding to remedial failure and triggering cycles of reform.