OVERCOMING THE IDEA OF LOWEST VALUE AND PROTECTION FOR ECONOMIC, SOCIAL AND CULTURAL RIGHTS

摘要

This work aims to provide an overview of the idea of the actual condition of human rights, seeking to introduce a critical view on them, with a special attention to social and cultural economic rights. The vision of traditional constitutionalism considers civil and political rights in a specific way because they are formally guaranteed, it is, they are rights that can be prosecuted and claimed at the courts. For this reason, these would be the human rights themselves. On the other side, from this same reason, there would be economic, social and cultural rights, which would only become mere guiding principles that inform positive legislation, judicial practice and acts of public authorities, as it establishes, for example, the Spanish Constitution of 1978. This situation crash with the idea of the indivisibility and interdependence of rights, an idea, according to which, the rights are linked by the same entity of principles and, being so, would not fit, among them, greater or lesser hierarchy of importance, respect and protection, as they are also rights themselves.