Making Sovereign Financing and Human Rights Work

Poor public resource management and 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 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.

This edited collection aims to contribute to filling this gap by introducing novel legal theories and analyses of the links between sovereign debt and human rights from a variety of perspectives. These chapters include studies of financial complicity, UN sanctions, ethics, transitional justice, criminal law, insolvency proceedings, millennium development goals, global financial architecture, corporations, extraterritoriality, state of necessity, sovereign wealth and hedge 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 chapters are then theorised by the editors in an introductory chapter.

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 book will contribute to that understanding as well as help practitioners in their everyday work. The authors include world-renowned lawyers and economists, experienced practitioners and officials from international organisations.

1. Placing Human Rights at the Centre of Sovereign Financing

Part I - Debt and Gross Violations of Political and Civil Rights
2. Rational Choice and Financial Complicity with Human Rights Abuses: Policy and Legal Implications
3. UN Sanctions that Safeguard, Undermine, or Both, Human Rights
4. The Significance of Human Rights for the Debt of Countries in Transition
5. Establishing Liability for Financial Complicity in International Crimes

Part II - Debt Crises and Social and Economic Rights
6. Human Rights and Sovereign Debt Workouts
7. A Sovereign Debt Overhang, Human Rights and the MDGs: Legal Problems through an Economist's Lens
8. Debts and State of Necessity
9. Global Financial Architecture and Human Rights
10. Sovereign Financing and Corporate Responsibility for Economic and Social Rights

Part III - Specific Financial Actors and Instruments, and Novel Approaches
11. Ethical Sovereign Investors: Sovereign Wealth Funds and Human Rights

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.