Leisure and Human Rights … or Social Justice?

AbstractThis paper notes the recent increased interest of leisure researchers in the concepts of human rights and social justice, with social justice being particularly favored by North America researchers. Since both concepts concern the just treatment and well-being of individuals and social groups in contemporary society, the paper aims to establish whether they represent distinctly different approaches to analysis or are overlapping in meaning and possibly complementary. It is found that, while some proponents of social justice down-play the significance of human rights, it is widely accepted that human rights are a component of social justice and that broad inclusive definitions of human rights encompass most of the concerns of social justice. It is therefore concluded that the two approaches to leisure analysis are complementary and each would benefit from incorporation of elements of the other in its conceptual framework and from more extensive engagement key generic social theory and policy frameworks.Keywords: Human rightssocial justicedistributive justiceleisure AcknowledgementsI am grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful and encouraging comments on the submitted version of the paper.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.Notes1 See: www.margaretthatcher.org/archive/Hayek2 Culture is defined by the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (Citation2009) as, “ways of life, language, oral and written literature, music and song, non-verbal communication, religion or belief systems, rites and ceremonies, sport and games, methods of production or technology, natural and man-made environments, food, clothing and shelter and the arts, customs and traditions through which individuals, groups of individuals and communities express their humanity and the meaning they give to their existence” (pp. 3-4).3 In Justice as Fairness Rawls (Citation2001) also discusses the possibility of adding leisure time to the list of primary social goods and concludes that it is “open to view” (p. 179).4 In fact, the Universal Declaration, which Rawls did not mention, achieved this consensus with the extensive list of rights shown in Figure 1.5 The first value resonates with capabilities-based approaches to human rights advanced by Sen (Citation2005) and Nussbaum (Citation2011, pp. 33-34).6 It has also been suggested that social democratic principles underlie much leisure research (Veal, Citation1998).