Thank you for the invitation of course it's a pleasure to be here today...

...and to talk to you about, indeed, what is my Ph.D. now turned into a book.

Maybe I can assure you the book isn't for sale yet.

So no worries about that.

I finished the PhD two years ago and I now turn it into a monograph that will be published

hopefully with Cambridge University Press later this year.

I hope it will be published by this year.

I just handed it in.

So I will talk about this book and about the idea of core socioeconomic rights in the European

convention of human rights.

But I will do so in a broader light.

So I will give you also some background on socioeconomic rights, on developments in terms

of socioeconomic rights and on how my project fits in here.

Very briefly this project of mine is about how the European court of human rights can

reason in the visible rights.

How does a court, an international, supranational human rights court, deal with socioeconomic

rights even though the rights, as they are listed in the European convention, are in

fact civil and political?

So that's the puzzle I have been working on.

But as I said, I will present it in a broader perspective, also not to get into too much

technical detail from the start.

So this is sort of the overview of what I'm going to do with you today.

I will first talk a little bit about the problematic of economic and social rights, and especially

for those of you who have done courses on this particular human rights topic, there

may be some familiar things in there.

Then I will move to the trends in terms of socioeconomic rights, and I think they can

be listed under two headers, namely justiciability but also indivisibility.

And I will explain what this is about.

And then I move to the topic of my book, and to in particular the European Court of Human

Rights, the reasoning of the European Court, and the idea of core rights protection, and

how I think this is a helpful tool and means for protection in that regard.

So if you have any questions, if I go too quick, if I go too slow and you know everything,

just let me know and I will adjust accordingly.

There's two caveats I put on the slide.

Caveats, maybe that's a little bit far-fetched, but at least it may be good to note that even

though Professor Kraewski was right to say that I'm a political scientist as well, my

primary focus is law in this project.

I am even working at the Department of Constitutional and Administrative Law, so I have a focus

especially on how rights are rendered definitive in terms of judicial individual rights.

So how do we move from vague norms in socioeconomic rights documents to concrete legal obligations

and expectations?

So that may be for the first focus.

The second thing I want to mention is, well, as you know, I'm from the Netherlands, and

why is this relevant here?

Well, it is relevant a little bit in terms of how I look at the European Court of Human

Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights.

I'm not sure if you're aware of that, but in the Netherlands we do have a constitution

that lists individual rights.

At the same time, we do not have a constitutional court, and we also do not have the possibility

to go to domestic court and argue that your case is in conflict with constitutional rights.