Over the last decade, the international community has debated whether the human rights framework can serve as an effective blueprint for economic justice. Many commentators cheering the atrophying of welfare states in the late 20th century claimed that democracy was unsustainable outside of capitalism or that social and economic rights were fundamentally illegitimate. Some contemporary historians and legal scholars have critiqued these claims but argue that even when human rights advocates did take socioeconomic rights seriously, a focus on securing minimal standards of living eclipsed the problem of material inequality.
The concept of the “human rights economy” (HRE) developed by nongovernmental organizations including the Center for Economic and Social Rights in the wake of these debates offers a potential human rights–based response to persistent global poverty and economic inequality. The embrace of the HRE by the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in 2023 marked a critical step toward a consciously anti-neoliberal, rights-based economic vision.
Today, the HRE is perhaps the most well-established proposal for realizing economic justice through human rights. Examining its current strengths and potential limitations can help human rights practitioners more effectively advance rights-based economic justice.
Material sufficiency as necessary for economic equality
My analysis of digitally available materials on HRE published between 2019 and mid-2025 showed that while authors emphasize economic inequality as a human rights problem, they use a rhetoric of sufficiency to push for greater wealth parity rather than a general “right to equality.” They argue that the market cannot provide the essential elements of a dignified life. Instead, guaranteeing social and economic rights requires the kinds of social programs made possible by economic redistribution. Thus, “rights-based tax and budget policies”—progressive taxes to fund public goods and welfare programs—are central to the HRE blueprint. The gulf between a minimally sufficient standard of living and the wealth of the superrich allows HRE advocates to mount an intuitive moral critique of existing economic structures: A system that fails to provide minimum standards of food and healthcare to all, when enough resources exist to do so, must be reformed.
For advocates, the redistributive policies required to address economic inequality necessarily follow from the socioeconomic rights codified in documents like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). In explicitly rejecting neoliberalism and embracing elements of the welfare state, the HRE re-legitimizes a human rights framework often critiqued as minimalist or out of touch with the material realities of everyday people.
Moving from inequality of wealth to inequality of power
The HRE critique of material deprivation is powerful, but the policies most often associated with it do not address the primary cause of disparities in wealth and income: unequal access to productive, and hence economic, power. While some publications on HRE imply a correlation between “inequality of resources” and “inequality of power,” their relationship often remains ambiguous. In their critique of neoliberalism and its unjust outcomes, HRE proponents tend to focus on economic redistribution by any number of economic visions—Red Deal, buen vivir, and Doughnut Economics, to cite a few—rather than asking why resources are unevenly distributed or analyzing the predistributive imbalances of economic power that undergird a capitalist political economy.
As the framework continues to develop, a new emphasis on how people’s unequal access to economic production shapes political power could help advocates more directly confront disparities from an ideologically consistent human rights perspective.
Predistributive thinking and human rights
A focus on predistribution translates easily into human rights terms. For example, studies have shown that the long-established right to form and join trade unions guaranteed in the ICESCR and highlighted by some HRE promoters evens out the distribution of wealth before taxation. The “solidarity economy” defined by worker-investor programs and other participatory business structures aligns well with the HRE. Advocates for HRE could likewise apply their appeal to basic material needs to these and other policies that seek more even access to production.
Moving toward a predistributive agenda could also help clarify that bringing about wealth equality is crucial to advancing the human rights community’s goals of political autonomy and freedom from exploitation. By committing to the policy implications of key values like dignity and agency, the movement can leverage a shared language of egalitarianism in support of states and communities seriously considering how economic power shapes political power.
The stakes are high—as many human rights advocates have contended, the need to rethink economic priorities is acute. Whether or not the HRE manages to carry this out effectively may substantially shape our ability to claim rights as a legitimate discourse of justice in the future.