human rights concern, a move to reinterpret human rights has meant that more and more rights can be claimed to protect victims from abusers which have no relation to the state. Examples include the rise of individual criminal responsibility for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Such application of human rights nevertheless by and large remained anchored in a positivist understanding of law, calling for the state to remain centrally involved as arbiter or enforcer. This has been, till date, the prevailing view with regard to civil and political rights as well as rights popularly defined as “group rights” (e.g. women rights, child rights, rights of the excluded communities etc.). The situation is somewhat more complicated with regard to economic, social and cultural rights (ESC rights). Economic and social rights are increasingly under threat worldwide as a result of government retrenchment in social spending for both pragmatic and philosophical reasons. Government indebtedness increased rapidly during the 1980s and early 1990s, and the response was to cut deeply into social programmes. And further government retrenchment would seem inevitable in the coming decade, as the recession- and the massive stimulus spending to counter it- has pushed governments back into deficit positions. In many countries, the earlier cuts in social programmes were imposed by the international financial institutions (notably the IMF and the World Bank) through structural adjustment programmes that became part of every loan package. The cumulative effect of these changes on the social safety net as a whole compounded the effect of cuts to individual strands. Philosophically, a neoliberal, or market-based, approach to governance has been promoted by international lending institutions and others since at least the late 1980s, and is now followed in many countries including in Bangladesh. The effect of this two-pronged approach- imposing social spending cuts in the context of a market-based governance strategyon the economic and social rights of the most vulnerable is increasingly questioned. But how to protect economic and social rights is difficult to conceptualise, as their legal effect is a matter of debate. The debate focuses mainly on the recognition of rights (i.e. their source and content) and their enforcement (i.e. justiciability), and the relationship between the two. However, this focus tends to have an interim step, that of the implementation of rights. ESC rights are recognized, either explicitly or implicitly, at both the international and domestic levels. Explicit recognition is found in a variety of international instruments ranging from hard- law treaties through to soft-law documents. Treaty examples of recognition of such rights include, at the universal level, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) and, at the regional level, the European Social Charter. Implicit recognition occurs through a process by which economic and social rights are “read into” international instruments dealing with civil and political rights. This is notably the case with the European Convention on Human Rights, where for example, the right to adequate housing has been read into the right to protection against inhuman and degrading treatment and the right to respect for private and family life. It is also the case with the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights, where a right to housing or shelter has been read into the combined effects of the rights to property, health and protection of the family. ESC rights are also recognized explicitly and implicitly at the domestic level. This recognition is strongest when it is found in constitutional documents, as in the 1996 South African constitution, but it might also be found in ordinary legislation although this is more vulnerable to changing political agendas. A recent legislative example is France’s Loi instituant le droit au logement opposable, which recognizes a right to “decent and independent” housing guaranteed by the State and enforceable by mediation and court action. “Reading in” also occurs at the national level, either constitutionally as in India where a right to adequate housing has been read into the constitutional guarantees of the right to life and mobility rights, or legislatively as in the United Kingdom where the Human Rights Act gives domestic effect to the European Convention. These legal regimes- international and domestic- can and often do intersect in two different ways. A first is in regard to content, as international rights are often incorporated into domestic legislation either by reference to the international instrument or in identical or substantially similar terms to it. A second is in regard to enforcement, as domestic courts often