Introduction

Human rights are assuredly one of the most influential and fruitful concepts of modern times and for many of the planet’s poor and oppressed they are regarded as the miraculous lenitive that can bring them that justice and that dignity indispensable to brightening their ephemeral earthly existence. Economics, in its turn, has developed a considerable number of tools especially designed to overcome, or at least mitigate scarcity, probably the most tormenting spectre that haunts the deprived each day. Human rights and economics thus contribute immensely to freeing human kind from what are probably the two most constraining chains amongst the many that oppress it: human rights from fear, and economics from want. Beside the fact that both human rights and economics deal with the same subject, the human being, economics and human rights are closely bound in yet many other ways. Indeed, there is no real individual freedom without freedom from want and there is no real economic choice without freedom of expression. There is, therefore, an economic dimension to human rights as much as a human rights dimension to economics.