ARE THERE LIMITS TO THE DEGRESSIVITY OF SOCIAL RIGHTS?

The consideration that legislative changes adversely affect the purpose and scope of social rights, also leading to various setbacks, raises important questions about the underlying enabling conditions. This paper argues that those regressions or the reversibility of social rights are normative decisions fundamentally limited in two ways. The first is the possibility to determine an essential content of social rights. The second lies with placing the weight of the justification of the decision in relation to the legitimacy of the norm. Both arguments lead to the consideration that the principle of proportionality can be seen as a complementary and alternative reasoning, but not as an alternative to the determination of the essential content in relation to the principle of non-regression.