Economic, Social and Cultural Rights

The AI Act, an EU regulation effective from August 2024, emphasises protecting human rights by ensuring AI transparency, safety, and ethical standards. It mandates clear labelling of AI-generated content to prevent misinformation and protect privacy. Educational institutions using AI, like ChatGPT, must comply, safeguarding students' rights and fostering ethical AI integration.

Welcome to our sixth Curated series, which provides a space to reflect on conversations developed in the context of the Fundamental Rights Forum 2024 in relation to various issues concerning some pressing human rights challenges of our time and the significance of preparedness to overcome them.

The European Court of Human Rights recently delivered two important judgments ruling that overrepresentation of Roma pupils in schools in North Macedonia and Albania was prejudicial, subtly lowering the threshold for finding this type of segregation discriminatory.

The European Commission has announced the largest reform of EU pharmaceutical legislation in over 20 years. It is worth exploring key elements of the proposals in light of the international human right to health and the duty to international assistance and cooperation.

A photojournalistic project tells the collapse of a state through the personal stories of its citizens. How applied human rights set the ability to understand complex human rights matters in a low-threshold manner? The example of Lebanon.

In Europe, far right political parties are introducing new legislation which represents a step backward in the progressive realisation of human rights. The principle of non-retrogression could be a useful tool in facing these challenges.

Kosovo Roma children and their right to education during times of emerging crisis represent the black swan of COVID-19 and distance learning. There is a disparity between the theory and the practice of the Kosovar government to provide equal learning opportunities to Roma children.

In the context of migration, especially irregular and forced, the risk of children being exposed to the abuse of child labour is high. Migration itself contains all the elements that are otherwise defined as risks of children being exposed to this type of abuse: poverty, irregular school attendance, parental unemployment, etc.

For generations, African families, schools, religious sects and peer groups have tried to ‘convert’ those who identify as LGBTQ+ in an effort to force them to conform to the heterosexual narrative promoted as ‘homogeneous’. However, individuals undergo serious physical and psychological suffering in the name of this pseudo-therapy.

Whereas the COVID-19 pandemic adversely affected the human rights of all persons globally, society’s poor and vulnerable faced elevated risks. The plight of Zimbabwe’s informal traders during the COVID-19 induced lockdown is emblematic.