1 Forthcoming in M. Langford and K. Young, eds., Oxford Handbook of Economic and Social Rights, OUP. Global Justice and Economic and Social Rights Cristina Lafont clafont@northwestern.edu Abstract: The protection of everyone’s economic and social rights is an essential component of any plausible theory of global justice. However, recent criticisms of the human rights project suggest that international human rights are not sufficiently ambitious or that they may be even detrimental to achieving global justice. This suspicion is supported by the fact that there has been a marked global increase in extreme inequality throughout the same period when states ratified more human rights treaties than ever before, including treaties that impose obligations to respect, protect and fulfill the socioeconomic rights of their populations. Against these criticisms I argue that the international human rights regime contains sufficiently ambitious normative standards to contribute to the achievement of global justice. However, in the context of a neoliberal global economic order, the state-centric allocation of human rights obligations tends to make human rights ineffectual in practice. On the basis of this diagnosis, I analyze recent developments in order to show that the human rights regime contains the necessary conceptual resources to overcome its state-centric limitations and that it can offer important normative support in the fight for global justice. Keywords: economic and social rights, global justice, neoliberalism, human rights minimalism, human rights obligations I. Introduction The protection of socioeconomic rights (e.g. rights to food, water, health care, housing, education, social security, work, and other material interests) is at the core of global justice. Socioeconomic rights are also included in theories of domestic and international justice. However, they are of special concern to theories of global justice because structural features of the global economy that states cannot change on their own often threaten their full realization. Traditional theories of domestic and international justice focus on the state and its responsibilities (towards its citizens and towards other states, respectively). In contrast, theories of global justice are concerned