In June 2026, French economist Thomas Piketty and his colleagues from the World Inequality Lab published the Global Justice Report. The report lays out a detailed institutional road map for achieving a more equal, just, and environmentally sustainable world by the year 2100. Such a world would see drastically reduced within-nation and between-nation income and wealth inequalities, a global economy redirected toward education, health care, and culture, and reductions in both working hours and humanity’s material footprint.
Remarkably, the report only mentions human rights once—a near-total omission even more surprising given Piketty’s extensive writings on social rights and the report’s focus on global justice and broad-based access to basic social goods. The single reference appears in a discussion of the “Global Justice Fund” that the authors propose as a way to promote income parity between nations. They stress that the fund should require recipients to center “social, environmental, and economic justice, as well as . . . the protection of human rights in general” in their work.
The report does not present human rights as part of its justification for a global redistribution scheme. It does not invoke them to help explain why political measures should be employed in the service of reparative justice. And it leaves unmentioned the connection between extreme inequality and the incomplete realization of internationally recognized economic and social rights in countries where governments often perform well below what is feasible given available national resources. These are all crucial missed opportunities.
Human rights, inequality, and neoliberalism
It is neither unprecedented nor fully surprising, however, that human rights feature very little in the Global Justice Report. For decades, human rights activism and organizing have focused more on political and civil rights than on economic, social, and cultural rights, which most directly impact material inequality. Scholars such as Samuel Moyn and Jessica Whyte have argued that the language of human rights has been largely incapable of resisting the rise of within-nation inequalities since the 1970s. Moyn describes human rights as a “powerless companion” to 1970s neoliberalism and growing inequality. Whyte goes further, referring to human rights as “fellow travelers” of neoliberal economics. Neoliberals, according to Whyte, actively appropriated the language of human rights to legitimize a global market regime and private property rights.
Human rights are not irrelevant to inequality
Yet human rights do in fact have something to say about material inequality. NGOs, independent United Nations experts, and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights widely acknowledge inequality as a human rights problem. It is a prominent focus for the UN’s human rights treaty bodies, special procedures of the Human Rights Council, and Universal Periodic Review. As Ignacio Saiz points out, “international human rights standards apply equally to governments’ use of fiscal policy as to their use of force.”
Human rights are broadly linked with struggles for health and social justice. Scholars envision a human rights economy that elevates human rights over corporate profits, rethinks economics based on human rights concerns, critiques extreme wealth, calls for fiscal justice, counters the post-Covid-19 economic policies of the IMF, and returns to the stronger human rights commitments of past decades. Recently, philosophers embracing limitarianism have proposed drawing an extreme wealth line to prevent harms to “democracy, media, the rule of law, the economy, social cohesion, equality, and the environment” as well as institutions that guarantee the protection of human rights.
Relinking global justice with human rights
In my book In Defense of Economic and Social Human Rights, I describe human rights advocates’ deep engagement with questions of material inequality and social justice. Even if human rights and inequality allegedly “surged” simultaneously from the 1970s onward, human rights are hardly to blame. Labor unions, socialist and social democratic ideologies, and other forces also failed to halt the rise of inequalities. Moreover, from the perspective of legal norms, including the establishment of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the 1960s were a much more transformative era for human rights than the period from the late 1970s onward.
Many human rights advocates understand that some level of redistributive justice is needed to realize and protect human rights fully. Rarely do they define specific “ceilings” on wealth as in contemporary limitarianism. But that does not mean they are inattentive to wealth and interested only in ensuring access to what is necessary to survive. They are critically aware of the stark contrasts between the wealth of the few and the unfulfilled human rights of the many and recognize that a realistic program for the realization of human rights is only feasible through redistribution.
In championing the importance of economic, social, and cultural rights, human rights advocates have developed a broad range of arguments. These center human dignity, democracy, the right to a share in society’s overall progress, the correction of arbitrary injustice (such as being born into deep poverty) by effectively fulfilling human rights, and the role of human rights in securing peace.
Human rights as a normative backbone and legal obligation
Human rights can strengthen advocacy in two ways. First, arguments for why rights are important establish widely accepted norms that bolster the perceived legitimacy of calls for global justice. Second, economic, social, and human rights are legal obligations of states. This fact helps establish a concrete platform for action and should not be ignored.
Policies mentioned in the Global Justice Report could be supplemented with reminders that states are legally obliged to protect and promote economic, social, and cultural rights and that monitoring and accountability mechanisms already exist. There is no need to repeat mistakes of the past by missing opportunities to link global justice with economic and social human rights.
Christian Olaf Christiansen’s book In Defense of Economic and Social Human Rights: An Intellectual History, 1940 to the Present was awarded the 2025 James J. Busuttil Prize and Medal for Human Rights by the Royal Asiatic Society.