Human Rights and Economic Policy Reform

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.

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 scrutiny4 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

Aoife Nolan is Professor of International Human Rights Law and Co-Director of the Human Rights Law Centre at Nottingham University School of Law, UK. She has been a member of the Council of Europe’s European Committee of Social Rights since 2017. Her books include Children’s Socio-economic Rights, Democracy & the Courts (Hart, 2011), Applying an International Human Rights Framework to State Budget Allocations: Rights and Resources (Routledge, 2014) and Economic and Social Rights after the Global Financial Crisis (CUP, 2014). She has acted as an expert advisor to a wide range of international and national organisations and bodies working on human rights and economic policy issues, including UN Special Procedures, UN treaty bodies, the Council of Europe, the World Bank, and multiple NHRIs and NGOs.

Juan Pablo Bohoslavsky is currently a consultant on finance and human rights issues for international organizations. He was between 2014 and 2020 the United Nations Independent Expert on Debt and Human Rights. He has worked at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and as a consultant for the Argentine state and the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC). His latest books are Pinochet's Economic Accomplices: An Unequal Country by Force (Lexington Boos, 2020), coedited with K. Fernández and S. Smart, and Covid-19 y Derechos Humanos, La Pandemia de la Desigualdad (Biblos, 2020). He holds a PhD in Law from Universidad de Salamanca.