The Right to Care and Support: From Care Theory to Human Rights Law

Care and support are central to social policy, yet they remain conceptually marginal within normative frameworks of human rights. This article examines the emergence of a right to care and support across feminist care theory, UN human rights standards, and Latin American constitutional jurisprudence. It argues that the emerging right to care, when reconstructed through the disability‐rights language of support, should be understood not as a derivative social entitlement, but as an autonomous human right with a critical function in ensuring other human rights. Political theories of care expose the limits of autonomy‐centred models of justice and social policy by foregrounding dependency, vulnerability, and relationality as constitutive features of human life. The article shows how these insights are translated, albeit unevenly, into international human rights discourse and crystallised through judicial reasoning that treats care as a condition of dignity and of the effectiveness of rights. Rather than proposing a programmatic catalogue of entitlements, the right to care and support is conceptualised as a relational and structural norm that reorients social policy towards the conditions of lived inclusion. The article concludes by arguing that recognising care as a matter of right challenges social policy to confront its underlying normative assumptions and to rethink the relationship between dependency, responsibility, and justice.