ABSTRACT
The question forms part of a wider question about the status of socioeconomic rights in law. Rights in law entail two aspects: normative standards for society and the institutional mechanisms for enforcement. Before the World Wars the right to property was the only economic right that was recognised as part of basic freedoms. Enlightenment thinkers put property rights on par with conventional human rights that existed in pre-modern societies such as right to life, liberty and conscience. Enlightenment thinkers also argued that state interference in the economy must be minimal. Adam Smith, the father of the discipline of economics, for example, argued in the eighteenth century that the role of the state must be that of a ‘night watchman’. The primacy of property rights and its equal status alongside life, liberty and conscience created economic polarisation, f inancial crises and social unrest. By late nineteenth century the economic and social inequalities that property rights introduced in societies made socialist thinkers like Karl Marx argue that the state was ‘the executive committee of the bourgeoisie’. The first half of the twentieth century was engulfed in political and social upheaval including the revolutions in Russia and Eastern Europe, the World Wars and the anti-colonial struggles. When the World Wars ended the victorious Allies proposed the formation of the United Nations. The UN Charter for the first time recognised economic rights beyond property rights.
