Roundtable: Discussion paper title: Subsistence Rights: Why Northern NGOs Apply the Human Rights Framework to Fight Extreme Poverty.

After the Universal Declaration was adopted in 1948, the next half-century of human rights practice resulted in the increasing legalization and professionalization of the human rights movement in the global North, and a focus on civil and political rights to the exclusion of economic and social rights. As a result, the world witnessed tremendous gains in the status of civil and political rights while many analysts declared economic and social rights inherently non-justiciable. In the past decade, Northern NGOs have begun to change course by committing themselves to subsistence rights (as part of a larger package of economic and social rights) and incorporating them into their work. In this paper I investigate the meaning of this trend for the politics of human rights. I first examine the causes of the trend, tracing the process by which the main human rights gatekeepers moved from resistance to at least partial acceptance of these rights. I argue that emerging NGO work on subsistence rights (particularly among social justice and humanitarian organizations) is reconfiguring human rights practice by opening up greater space for “moral” approaches to rights, which de-link human rights from international legal texts, and which typically seek social changes that do not have legal enforcement as their ultimate end. Moral understandings of rights are often consistent with traditional legal understandings, but the two approaches have distinct consequences for how human rights politics is undertaken. Moral and legal approaches also lead to distinct challenges for the actors involved, which have implications for whether and how their goals are achieved. Rather than trying to protect a “core” of civil and political rights or well-established methodologies, I argue that our notion of human rights (including what it means to do human rights work) needs to be broadened. Rather than threatening to dilute civil and political rights, emerging work on subsistence rights has the potential to strengthen civil and political rights by causing us to reconsider the legal and moral grounds – and the formal and informal processes – upon which all human rights are based. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]