This chapter opens with a focus on the Charter and Declaration, before undertaking an in-depth examination of civil and political rights, and economic and social rights respectively. The Declaration includes both categories. These categories are far from airtight. Many treaties declare rights that straddle the two, or that fall clearly within the domains of both of them. Many rights are hard to categorize. Nonetheless, at their core, the conventional distinctions are clear, whatever the relationships and interdependency between the two. Freedom from torture, equal protection, due process and the right to form political associations fall within the first category; the right to health or food or education come within the second.

The remaining sections of this chapter introduce basic ideas and instruments of the universal human rights regime that concern civil and political rights; the next chapter addresses economic and social rights.

Section B examines the ICCPR.

Section C then turns to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) a major treaty that took form several decades after work on drafting the ICCPR began, and that reveals different concerns, goals and strategies of the human rights regime. Comparison of the ICCPR and CEDAW offers insight into the evolution and changing character of civil and political rights and their implementation.

In Section D we focus on efforts designed to prohibit discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation and to protect the rights of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender persons in order to illustrate the evolution of new norms within the international system.

Section E makes for a contrast with Section D by looking at threats posed in recent years, primarily in the context of counter-terrorism activities, to the long-established and seemingly well-entrenched norm against torture.