Economic, social and cultural rights are socio-economic human rights; compare with civil and political rights. Economic, social and cultural rights are included in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and elaborated upon in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). Examples of such rights include the right to food, the right to housing and the right to health.

The theory of three generations of human rights considers this group of rights to be "second-generation rights", and the theory of negative and positive rights considers them to be positive rights. Some societies are unwilling to enshrine purported economic, social and cultural rights as legal rights, seeing them only as needs that society or government might provide if resources are available, but which are not justiciable unless they are established by some contract. Conversely, social, economic and cultural rights are fully justiciable as defined by many constitutions and human rights mechanisms around the world.

For example, the 1996 South African Constitution has included social, economic and cultural rights, and the South African Constitutional Court has subsequently heard claims under these obligations (see Grootboom and Treatment Action Campaign cases). Other jurisdictions, such as India, which does not explicitly recognize economic and social rights in their constitution, has nonetheless found that these rights exist, though unenumerated, inferable from the right to life. Finally, the Optional Protocol to the International Convention on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, newly adopted by the UN General Assembly in December 2008, now offers a legal mechanism to claim legal redress for violations of economic, social and cultural rights inflicted by a state which has ratified the ICESCR.

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