The Indivisibility of Human Rights: An Empirical Analysis

This article aims to test whether human rights have an indivisible nature. To do that, we perform correlation analysis and Granger causality tests to test 1) the relationship within socio-economic rights and 2) between socio-economic rights and civil-political rights. The results show that certain socio-economic rights have mutual reinforcing relationships, lending support to the existence of widespread indivisibility. This finding yields relevant policy implications. Given their financial constraints, states could make use of the existence of widespread indivisibility, in combination with the progressive implementation clause, to foster the efficient allocation of resources for human rights implementation. Furthermore, this article shows that the intensity of indivisibility varies depending on the income category of states: the indivisible nature of socio-economic rights is more intense in low-income countries while seems to achieve a saturation point at the highest levels of human rights compliance. We, thus, propose to define this phenomenon as ‘indivisibility saturation’. Lastly, our findings detect a more complex picture for the indivisibility principle between the two classes of human rights. While widespread indivisibility does not follow from the tests, important unidirectional relationships between different human rights exist and are equally important for human rights policy-making purposes.