Budget Analysis as a Tool to Monitor Economic and Social Rights: Where the Rubber of International Commitment Meets the Road of Government Policy (original) (raw)

Budget Analysis as a Tool to Monitor Economic and Social Rights

Journal of Human Rights Practice

This policy and practice note investigates budget analysis as a potential method for human rights practitioners to adopt and implement in their ongoing work. It uses expert interviews, detailed reviews of prior budget analyses, and academic literature to identify the strengths and weaknesses of budget analysis as a method. Budget analysis is a powerful tool for human rights activists. Budgets represent a key piece of evidence for practitioners to hold governments accountable to their obligations to increasingly and effectively generate, allocate, and expend resources for economic and social rights-related programmes. However, there are important issues to consider before conducting a budget analysis, including available expertise and institutional interest in investment, the ability to monitor state allocation over time, and how to work closely with governments. There are also clear limitations to budget analysis as a method, including lack of credible and accessible data, its effectiveness as a monitoring mechanism, and how it can further entrench the assumption that economic and social rights are not on an equal footing with civil and political rights. Despite these issues and limitations, budget analysis should be considered an important, and viable, method for practitioners to consider using in their advocacy efforts.

Socio-Economic Rights & Budget Analysis: Some Notes on Available Resources, ‘Progressivity’ and Non-Retrogression

Human Rights in Ireland, 2014

Structural adjustment and austerity have been implemented in recent years in Ireland in keeping with right-wing thinking, coming in the form of a 2:1 ratio of cuts in services to tax increases (themselves often regressive in nature). Levels of poverty and inequality have deepened. Socio-economic protections have been resolutely subordinated by the state’s loyalty to financial institutions and the imperatives of transnational capital. There has been no departure from the race to the bottom for foreign investment in which Ireland is engaged, with the diversion of resources to corporate tax reduction measures continuing in various guises. In the face of such market hegemony, what can international human rights discourse offer when it comes to social justice advocacy and budget analysis?

Review of Nolan A., O’Connell R., Harvey C. (eds.), Human Rights and Public Finance: Budgets and the Promotion of Economic and Social Rights (Oxford and Portland, Hart Publishing, 2013)

Nordicum-Mediterraneum, vol. 9, n. 1, 2014

The volume offers not only good quality contributions, but also a short biography of the authors, an explanation of the abbreviations, an introduction, and, at the end of the volume, a useful index.

A Rights-based Assessment (RBA) of Bangladesh’s National Budget 2014-15

A Rights-based Assessment (RBA) of Bangladesh’s National Budget 2014-15, 2015

This paper examines Bangladesh’s National Budget of 2014-15 from the perspective of a rights-based approach (RBA) to development model. Comprised of plans, policies and processes of development, the national budget has been analyzed to understand how a RBA model can incorporate the concept of human development in the design and implementation process of different development programs mandated by the annual budget. The paper aims to present the rights-based inquiry of national budget by putting it into a system of rights and corresponding obligations established by the normative framework of international human rights law. In addition, the paper assesses the prospects of promoting the sustainability of development work, empowering people themselves – especially the most marginalized and disadvantaged – to participate in policy formulation and holding accountable those who have a duty to act. Based on these analyses, recommendations for evaluation and monitoring of Bangladesh’s national budget’s implementation in line with the rights-based development model for all citizens are proposed and elucidated.

What the UN Human Rights Treaty Bodies Tell Us about Economic Inequalities and Human Rights: An Empirical Analysis of Twenty Years of Practice

Human Rights and Economic Inequalities, 2021

Public budgets and economic and social rights The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights commits the States parties to »take steps ... to the maximum of [their] available resources, with a view to achieving progressively the full realization of the rights recognized in the present Covenant ...«. While this »progressive realization« clause is typically seen as a weakness it can also be turned into a strength: with this provision, the way States mobilize resources and how they define their spending priorities become human rights issues, allowing human rights bodies to scrutinize public budgets.

Accounting for human rights: An overview and introduction

Critical Perspectives on Accounting, 2011

Accounting for human rights: An overview and introduction In June 2011 the UN Human Rights Council endorsed the UN Secretary General's Special Representative on business and human rights, final proposal for Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. According to the press release: "The Guiding Principles seek to provide for the first time an authoritative global standard for preventing and addressing the risk of adverse human rights impacts linked to business activity." The Principles are designed to advance the implementation of Ruggies' (2008) "Protect, Respect and Remedy" framework which was enthusiastically endorsed by the UN Human Rights Council in 2008 (see McCorquodale, 2009, for critique of the framework). This framework has already begun to be reflected in corporate policies and annual and social responsibility reports. The TNT corporation, for example, note in their 2009 annual report that during the year they completed a human rights audit "based on the Ruggie report" and they affirm that it is "TNT's objective to improve its human rights approach and to further align with the Ruggie framework". The AngloGold Ashanti 2010 Sustainability report similarly announces that in the year ahead they will "aim to develop a policy, frameworks and procedures on human rights, giving due recognition to the guiding principles on business and human rights which are currently being formulated by the UN Secretary General's Special Representative on Business and Human Rights, Professor John Ruggie." 1 These developments at the UN, along with the specific corporate disclosures on human rights commitments and impacts are partially related to a growing concern over corporate complicity in human rights abuses. The disclosure by AngloGold above, for example, needs to be understood in the context of a 2005 report by Human Rights Watch which claimed that the company had made payments to a "murderous armed group" in the Democratic Republic of Congo in order to gain access to valuable tracks of DRC's natural resources. 2 However, the emergence of human rights within the discourse of corporate accountability also reflects the broader triumph of modernity (Douzinas, 2000). Some critical legal scholars have questioned the extent to which this victory represents the triumph of class and gender interests (see Dembour, 2006) while others draw on Derrida's (1994, p. 85) observation 'that never before in absolute figures, have so many men, women, and children been subjugated, starved, or exterminated on earth,' to equate the ubiquity of human rights with the triumph of postmodern cynicism (Douzinas, 2000, 2007). Legal scholars more sympathetic to the possibilities of human rights have begun to critique emerging frameworks that seek to apply the ideology of human rights to businesses. Critiques of Ruggie's Guiding Principles, for example, point out that home state responsibility to encourage corporations to respect human rights is being watered down to a less burdensome requirement to merely set out a list of expectations in relation to business responsibility for human rights 3 (Cernic, 2010; Grabosch, 2011). Yet despite the ubiquity of the ideals of human rights and the associated critical legal scholarship which questions these ideals and the way they are being translated into practice, thus far the accounting profession and academia have largely been missing from the debate, despite the fact that there would appear to be obvious links with the power, justice and emancipation themes of critical accounting research. Over and above the opportunities created for critical accounting praxis, the emergence of human rights into the discourse on corporate accountability poses a range of critical questions about whether it is helping to substantively improve the lives of workers, women and children, but it also raises questions about the powerful ways in which this discourse is

The Obligation to Mobilise Resources: Bridging Human Rights, Sustainable Development Goals, and Economic and Fiscal Policies

Human rights bodies have articulated the elements of States' obligations to mobilise resources for the resalisation of human rgihts. This publication draws on pronouncements of UN human rights special procedures and treaty bodies to present a detailed examination of what the obligation to mobilise resources entails. It looks inter alia at the legal basis for the obligation, gender issues, human rights impact assessments, tax policies, corruption and austerity measures. Finally, it puts forward recommendations for UN human rights special procedures and treaty bodies.