ABSTRACT
Despite the statement in the Vienna Declaration of 1993 that proclaims all human rights as “universal, indivisible and interdependent and interrelated," certain categories of rights within the international corpus are marginalized. The upsurge in concern about the phenomenon of globalization and its varied impacts on contemporary society has spurred the current increase in attention paid to economic, social, and cultural rights. Economic, social, and cultural rights are as much marginalized in the discourse, as they are in the enforcement. In 1981, the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights ("Charter") became widely recognized for breaking new conceptual ground in human rights law by including civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights in a single instrument. The scourge of military dictatorship and undemocratic governance has long been an issue of concern to human rights activists and academics on the African continent.
