Making Sovereign Financing and Human Rights Work

Poor public resource management, the global financial crisis curbing fundamental fiscal space, millions thrown into poverty, and authoritarian regimes running successful criminal campaigns with the help of financial assistance - these are all phenomena that raise fundamental questions around finance and human rights. They also highlight the urgent need for more systematic and robust legal and economic thinking about sovereign finance and human rights. In July 2012, the UN Human Rights Council finally issued its own guidelines on foreign debt and human rights, yet much remains to be done to promote better understanding of the legal and economic implications of the interface between finance and human rights. This volume contributes to that understanding, as well as helps practitioners in their everyday work. With contributions by world-renowned lawyers, economists, experienced practitioners, and officials from international organizations, it fills a gap in the literature on legal and economic thinking about the interface between finance and human rights and will be of interest to those working in the area of human rights. The book introduces novel legal theories and analyses of the links between sovereign debt and human rights from a variety of perspectives. The chapters include studies of financial complicity, UN sanctions, ethics, transitional justice, criminal law, insolvency, millennium development goals, global financial architecture, trade, corporations, wealth funds, project financing, state responsibility, international financial institutions, the right to development, UN initiatives, litigation, as well as case studies from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. These are then theorized by the editors in a concluding chapter.

Juan Pablo Bohoslavsky is a sovereign debt expert at United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.Jernej Letnar Cernic is Assistant Professor of Human Rights Law, School of Government and European Studies, Brdo pri Kranju, Slovenia.