Center for Economic and Social Rights
"[3] CESR maintains an international board of directors, encompassing leadership from South Africa, the United States, Colombia, Japan, Bangladesh, Sweden, and Australia.
The organization has continued to carry out the original vision since its creation, yet it has evolved its strategies to adapt to and meet the consistent transformations and evolutions in the field of human rights as well as world issues at large.
In 2004, Eitan Felner became the new executive director of CESR and put into effect a series of rights monitoring techniques for the organization to use and teach to others in order to bring about more concrete changes.
Most importantly, the world will only continue to move into an era of globalization and development that will put economic and social rights at the forefront of international and national law.
Despite having fairly ore resources than many other countries in the region, progress in the area of economic and social rights has been stunted and successful outcomes have been minimal.
Through research and analysis, CESR determined that it is the state's fiscal policy that has been a driving factor in the denials and violations of economic and social rights in the country.
CESR sought to facilitate and promote changes in Guatemala through exposing the problems with the state's fiscal policy and make human rights an integral part of the debate and reform of the nations' budgets and taxes.
[9] In addition to bringing human rights into fiscal debate and tax reforms and seeking government commitment on social spending in areas such as women's health, child malnourishment and ethnic and rural/urban inequalities, CESR has also stated its official advocacy goals as the following CESR was ,overall ,able to affect the 2010 fiscal policy of Guatemala through its strategies and efforts and obtain government and donor commitment to economic and social rights, the enforcement and adherence to this commitment will prove difficult in the future especially as the CESR faced many limits and challenges significantly in the lack of knowledge and concern for human rights from policy makers and challenges of organizational partnership, among others.
In addition, CESR promoted yet did not consolidate the monitoring capacity and ability of the state and other organizations for economic and social rights and was only able to make small advances in media and business discourses and apply pressure for accountability in international reviews.
This includes not just focusing efforts at the higher end of the spectrum such as with governments and donors but more in-depth and greater involvement of the local populations who will be the ones most affected by a reallocation of resources inherent in economic and social rights.
In addition to their efforts to educate the general public, groups, organizations and governments, their networking and coalition building as also allowed CESR to work towards public policy change through political pressure, significantly through exposure of denials and violations of economic and social rights and working towards holding governments and non-state actors accountable for these rights.
Generally speaking, CESR also works internationally to pressure states to fulfil their Millennium Development Goals with varying successes and setbacks.
