What future for the minimum core? Contextualising the implications of South African socioeconomic rights jurisprudence for the international human right to health
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The South African Constitutional Court’s emerging jurisprudence on the right to health has provided a ground-breaking and often controversial illustration of this right’s justiciability. The Court’s enforcement of South Africa’s constitutional right to access health care services has served to considerably erode traditional objections to social rights, illustrating that judicial enforcement of these rights is not only feasible in developing countries, but may effectively challenge the irrational and uncaring governance that so often perpetuates and exacerbates gross health inequalities. The Court’s approach nonetheless poses challenging theoretical questions, given its adoption of a standard of reasonableness to adjudicate potential social rights violations, and its consequent rejection of an enforceable minimum core to these rights. The minimum core concept reflects the fundamental human rights idea that certain individual interests, including the basic health needs of the poor, should be prioritized at any cost. The core suggests that social rights, and the interests they reflect, should place reasonable limits on political and economic actions that intrude so far into basic needs as to render human dignity and equal worth meaningless. The Court’s rejection of this idea, and the apparent rupture of the Court’s approach from human rights law, begs to be reconciled with international legal theory and practice, so that the validity of international human rights law as an authoritative and indeed realistic guide for state action and judicial review is not diminished, and so that the innovative work of the South African Constitutional Court is not seen to reinforce indefensible objections to social rights.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.017 | 0.024 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.039 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.020 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.012 | 0.018 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".