Activation Policies for the Unemployed and the International Human Rights Case Law on the Prohibition of Forced Labour

In Western Welfare States, entitlement to social benefits has always been conditioned by a duty to work. It has been traditionally considered that work-related obligations imposed on social benefits recipients were not likely to contravene the prohibition of forced labour. Since the early 1990s, Western Welfare States have tended to activate the unemployed and are steadily reinforcing their duty to work. In this contribution, we demonstrate that, in this new context, international supervisory bodies of the application of civil and political rights are progressively abandoning the traditional principle of impermeability between work-related obligations in social protection systems and the prohibition of forced labour. They now admit that activation measures for the unemployed might in certain circumstances violate the prohibition of forced labour. Nevertheless, they are still adopting a very formalistic approach to these cases, compared to their general case law concerning the prohibition of forced labour.