The OPERA Framework
principles to take into account when monitoring ESC rights fulfillment and offers practical guidance
on which tools and techniques might be employed to evaluate them. These range from simple
descriptive statistics that summarize data to more complex fiscal policy and budget analysis that
assess the availability and allocation of resources. By making explicit this crucial link between the
various human rights standards and principles that underpin the obligation to fulfill and the different
assessment methods available to monitor them, the framework enables a systematic approach to
building evidence of failures to fulfill ESC rights. This framework has been developed by the Center
for Economic and Social Rights (CESR), an international non-governmental organization, as part of its
work to promote greater accountability for breaches of this duty, which underlie many of the most
widespread and pervasive deprivations of ESC rights.
By providing an overarching framework to integrate multiple tools and methods, the OPERA
framework enables advocates and activists to build up a well-evidenced argument about a state’s
compliance with its obligation to fulfill ESC rights. This can be very powerful for advocacy, whether
focused on securing remedies for current violations or on advancing reforms for preventing them in
the future. On the one hand, providing quantitative, cross-disciplinary evidence demonstrating the
link between poor development outcomes and breaches of the obligation to fulfill economic and
social rights can prompt ‘decision-makers’ to be more responsive to, or at least less dismissive of,
human rights arguments. At the same time, supporting rights-holders to expose and articulate the
injustices they face using robust, credible methods anchored in the human rights framework can help
give their demands for justice renewed force.
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