Human Rights and Economic Policy Reform

Aoife Nolan, Juan Pablo Bohoslavsky

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000454062
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book deals with the complex and challenging relationship between economic policy and human rights. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis, the need to address the conceptual and methodological (dis)connects between these two areas is more pressing than ever.

Inspired by the 2019 United Nations Guiding Principles on Human Rights Impact Assessments (HRIA) for Economic Reform Policies, this book brings together experts working on human rights and economic policy from a range of disciplinary perspectives, including economics, law, and development studies. The contributions reflect a huge body of professional experience in the academic, policy-making, advocacy, and practitioner fields. They cover issues including the politics of evidence in the context of HRIA, economic inequality, child rights impact assessment of economic reforms, economic policy and women's human rights, tax regimes for multinational corporations and human rights, as well as the human rights impacts of the economic fall-out of the COVID-19 pandemic. The collection also includes the text of the Guiding Principles themselves. It constitutes a crucial volume for scholars, policymakers, advocates and others working on the burning topic of human rights and economic policy reform.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of The International Journal of Human Rights.

Human rights and economic policy reforms

Aoife Nolan and Juan Pablo Bohoslavsky

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the vexed relationship between human rights and economic policy reform. It opens with an exploration of the reasons for the historic and contemporary nonalignment and disconnect between these areas. It then turns to an overview of the 2019 Guiding Principles on Human Rights Impact Assessments for Economic Reform Policies, developed under the mandate of UN Independent Expert on debt and human rights. Having introduced the different contributions to the Special Issue, the authors conclude by addressing the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis for the relationship between human rights and economic policy reform. Will this crisis serve as an opportunity to accelerate mutual understanding or will human rights concerns remain subordinated to economic ones?

Introduction: a brief history of human rights and economic policy reforms

The vexed relationship between economic policy reform and human rights is a hot topic, with the global and financial crises that began in 2007–2008 rapidly accelerating academic, advocacy and policymaker attention to human rights and economic policy (dis)connects.¹ These disconnects have once again come into sharp focus as the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic – ‘plunging the world economy into a recession with historical levels of unemployment and deprivation’² – and its potential impacts on human rights have become ever-more obvious.

It is important to recognise successes and ongoing challenges in terms of work focused on the link between human rights and economic policy up to this point. On the one hand, there has been growing deployment of human rights as a discourse and a conceptual framework to critique economic policy-making inputs, outputs and processes in terms of their impact on human dignity, lived experience and life opportunities. On the other, there has been ever-greater recognition of the serious challenges with regard to leveraging human rights so as to engage meaningfully with economic policy-making – whether conceptually (in terms of standards), methodologically (in terms of tools) or in terms of practical impact.

Great strides have been taken on the conceptual front over the last decade through the development of understanding of the scope of human rights obligations from an economic policy-making perspective. This has included the elaboration and deployment of previously recognised but under-developed duties such as non-retrogression,³ maximum available resources⁴ and extra-territorial obligations⁵ so as to address the effects of economic policy-making on human rights in the context of economic globalisation. At the same time, key human rights entities (including UN treaty bodies and UN special procedures)⁶ and scholars⁷ have engaged more directly with national and supranational bodies and systems that have a central role in economic policy-making. This includes bodies that had historically been regarded (and, in some instances at least, had sought to portray themselves) as ‘outwith’ the human rights schema. As a result, issues such as structural readjustment,⁸ finance,⁹ sovereign debt,¹⁰ fiscal austerity,¹¹ tax justice¹² and aspects of international economic law,¹³ can and are presented as topics of human rights concern to an ever-greater degree. In methodological terms, there has been an advance in terms of the tools deployed by those concerned with human rights to deconstruct economic policy – and, in turn, to reconstruct such.¹⁴ Building on (and in some instances originating from) feminist and progressive economics, there has been significant progress in the development of alternative, more ‘human rights consistent’ economic models.¹⁵

However, despite these advances, human rights’ impact on and traction in relation to economic policy-making remain weak. Tools and approaches developed by advocates and academics remain unembraced by key decision-makers on, and implementers of, economic policy. The foundational elements of mainstream economics that are not congruent with human rights remain largely unassailed.¹⁶ Neoliberal economics’ prioritisation of economic growth over human rights goals remains largely unmoderated. Human rights practitioners have the language and they are developing the tools but this has very definitely not resulted in wholescale reconfiguration of dominant economic policy-making paradigms or in a tempering of their negative human rights impacts.¹⁷ While there are multiple reasons for this situation, it is in no small part attributable to the largely unassailed supremacy of economists in the fiscal and macroeconomic spheres, as well as the ongoing operation of human rights and economics actors in separate, watertight spheres. Both of these long-time factors continue to contribute significantly to the side-lining and undermining of human rights in the design and implementation of economic policy reform.

This is the backdrop against which the Guiding Principles on Human Rights Impact Assessments for Economic Reform Policies (Guiding Principles/GP), the motivating factor for this Special Issue, were created and will be operationalised. It is also the context in which the contributors to this Special Issue have developed their work on human rights and economic policy reform.

The Guiding Principles on Human Rights Impact Assessments for Economic Reform Policies

The Guiding Principles did not emerge from nowhere, whether methodologically or normatively. The methodological origins of human rights impact assessment (HRIA) lie in the introduction of environmental impact assessment in the 1960s.¹⁸ From the 1980s on, there was a growing development and deployment of social impact assessment tools to identify the social consequences (for instance, in terms of poverty, inequity or health) of economic policies. Such impact assessment was particularly notable in the work of development-focused actors such as the World Bank Group, Asian Development Bank, African Development Bank and the UN Development Programme. The 2000s saw HRIAs evolve from being included as an element of social impact assessment to constituting autonomous policy tools,¹⁹ with the focus on such work increasing exponentially in the last two decades.²⁰

The rising profile and employment of HRIA – encouraged by a range of international and human rights actors,²¹ including in the context of Guiding Principles developed by UN Special Procedures²² – coincided initially with the growing traction of economic and social rights²³ and subsequently with growing concern about the impact of economic policy reform on human rights in the context of the financial and economic crises of the late 2000s. The last decade has seen a wide range of human rights actors, including UN Treaty bodies and Special Procedures, highlighting the duty to undertake HRIAs of economic reforms specifically.²⁴ However, prior to the Guiding Principles on HRIAs of Economic Policy Reforms, no consistent and comprehensive rights-based framework for conducting HRIA of economic reform programmes has emerged so far from the UN and its various human rights actors.

A brief history of the Guiding Principles

The Guiding Principles were developed under the auspices of the mandate of the Independent Expert on the effects of foreign debt and other related international financial obligations of States on the full enjoyment of all human rights, particularly economic, social and cultural rights (Independent Expert on debt and human rights/Independent Expert).²⁵ This is unsurprising given that one the principal areas of the UN Special Procedures mandate on ‘debt and human rights’ since its conception has been ‘structural adjustment and its effects on human rights’. Initially, there were two mandates: that of the Independent Expert on ‘structural adjustment programs’, established in 1997,²⁶ and, a year later, the Special Rapporteur on ‘the effects of external debt on the full enjoyment of economic, social and cultural rights’.²⁷ In 2000, these mandates were discontinued when the mandate of the Independent Expert ‘on the effects of structural adjustment policies and foreign debt on the full enjoyment of all human rights, particularly economic, social and cultural rights’ was established.²⁸ The 2005 broadening of the mandate from ‘the effects of structural adjustment policies’ to ‘the effects of economic reform policies’ to some degree set the scene for the broad scope of the Guiding Principles, albeit that the mandate was redefined and retitled in 2008.²⁹ Since 2008, mandate-holders have looked at a range of different economic policy issues from a human rights perspective, including in reports on the impact of economic reform policies on women’s human rights, labour rights in the context of economi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Human rights and economic policy reforms
• 2 Human rights impact assessments and the politics of evidence in economic policymaking
• 3 Human rights and democracy in economic policy reform: the European COVID-19 response under scrutiny
• 4 Economic inequality and human rights impact assessments of economic reforms
• 5 Ex ante children’s rights impact assessment of economic policy
• 6 Economic policy and women’s human rights: a critical political economy perspective
• 7 Re-righting the international tax rules: operationalising human rights in the struggle to tax multinational companies
• 8 Guiding principles on human rights impacts assessments of economic policy reforms
• Index