Our May 2018 edition of ESCR-Justice was the 100^th edition of our monthly case newsletter. This represents a significant milestone for ESCR-Net and for recognition of the justiciability of ESCR more broadly. We wish to take the opportunity this month to look back on the first 100 issues and celebrate by sharing with you some highlights of our collective work on ESCR-Justice!

ESCR-Justice (12 issues a year currently sent out to over 1500 email subscribers and shared with a wider audience on facebook and twitter) features key excerpts from particularly significant cases from our network’s caselaw database. The database is a platform for sharing positive and final domestic, regional and international legal decisions from around the world regarding economic, social and cultural rights. It currently contains over 230 case summaries – primarily in English and Spanish, with a growing number in French and Arabic as well. These highlight important normative aspects of decisions, but also focus on the status of enforcement and the significance of judgments, as well as provide information on involved groups and relevant secondary resources. The database is searchable via various criteria including keyword, country, thematic focus, type of forum and language. In recent years, there has been a significant increase in visits to the database, currently with over 100,000 unique views per year.

Members developed the database to share and learn from effective litigation strategies and creative implementation tactics, allowing for cross-fertilization of jurisprudence. The database demonstrates the justiciability of ESCR globally, as well as the interdependence and indivisibility of rights. It also fosters greater awareness about systemic ESCR issues – in this regard, the cases allow us to identify and understand cross-jurisdictional patterns of violations (and how these can be connected to common global conditions), as well as recognize areas where we continue to face legal interpretation and implementation challenges so we can take targeted collective action. This shared understanding allows us to understand and strengthen the role of strategic litigation within broader human rights advocacy plans. In upcoming months, the Strategic Litigation Working Group will deepen its exploration of the opportunities associated with litigation, by leading a series of strategic litigation workshops focusing on current Network collective activities and cross-cutting ESCR issues.

ESCR-Justice is a collective effort of ESCR-Net’s Strategic Litigation Working Group members, with additional input and analysis from other ESCR-Net working groups. How do members engage?

• Member organizations and individual members often recommend cases we should feature in ESCR-Justice and the database. These are cases that they may have recently litigated, that represent significant developments in jurisprudence in their region and/or that they feel is of critical consequence and would benefit fellow human rights advocates in our network and beyond.
• Members frequently draft the case summaries.
• Many of you in our network have graciously contributed time to review and strengthen case summaries through your knowledge of and insight on a particular case, and expertise in relation to a particular subject area/legal system.
• We also hear from you regarding specific editions of ESCR-Justice and appreciate your thoughtful reflections on the featured cases and its relevance for you.

Thank you, all of you, for the different ways in which you collectively contribute to the development and ongoing evolution of the database and the newsletter. In particular, we would like to express our gratitude to the Program on Human Rights and the Global Economy (PHRGE) at Northeastern University School of Law which provides significant ongoing support.

We also wish to express our deep appreciation for our incredible translators who help enormously in making ESCR-Justice and the database more accessible to attorneys and activists across the world.

Thank you all once again! Please stay as engaged as you are so the database and newsletter can remain a truly collective, global effort to capture developments in the ESCR litigation landscape of relevance to human rights lawyers but also the broader human rights community, particularly social movements and grassroots groups who play a critical role in translating legal norms into concrete and even transformative change.

If you have suggestions for specific cases to include in the case database, or ideas about the future of database and how we share news about important cases, please contact Joie Chowdhury at jchowdhury@escr-net.org

Visit the caselaw database