Proceduralism in Social and Economic Rights

This dissertation engages with and contributes to a growing literature on procedural approaches in theorizing, monitoring and adjudicating social and economic rights, with reference to new governance literature. It analyzes a move in social and economic rights away from the generation and monitoring of substantive norms by treaty monitors, judges, and scholars, and toward processes designed to generate accountable, participatory, non-uniform, iterative responses to rights broadly conceived. The first paper explores the emphasis on new governance style proceduralism in the adjudication of these rights. The second focuses on the right to health and considers how collaborations among criminal justice, public health, and community actors can be informed by the new proceduralism in state responses to non-disclosure of HIV-status in sexual relationships. The third and final article argues that the use of new governance style proceduralism for rationalizing the distribution of publicly-funded health care resources in Canada dovetails with the emergent focus on process in human rights to open space for more meaningful human rights scrutiny. Each of the three papers concludes with a discussion of the limits of these emerging approaches.