The Justiciability of Social Rights:
The Universalization of the “European Exception”
George Katrougalos
Associate Professor, Demokritos University of Greece
The aim of the article is to analyze the issue of justiciability of social rights in the light of their international and domestic application, in association with their institutional implementation on various types of the welfare state. The first point that it aims to highlight is the existence of an unequivocal correlation between the constitutional recognition of social rights and the institutional and organizational particularities of the three main welfare state regimes, the “three worlds of Welfare capitalism”, on the other. For this reason, there is a structural, historical predetermination against the recognition of social rights in the so-called “liberal model” of welfare state. The second point of the article is that, despite all this, there is a clear process towards a holistic way of conceptualizing human rights, beyond the boundaries of the traditional legal categories and the different types of welfare state. This is mainly due to the integrationist function of international law and the case law of international courts.
