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) (original) (raw)
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?
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.
Journal of Human Rights Practice, 2017
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.
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
Human Rights Quarterly , 2023
Over the decades human rights advocates have increasingly engaged with economic policy. Until recently this engagement has tended to be reactive and piecemeal, but in the last few years there has been a growing focus on what economies would look like if they were based on human rights. This article reports on an inquiry into whether it is possible to articulate a concept of Human Rights Economics and if so what its main features would be. It presents branches of economics such as ecological economics and feminist economics, noting the new elements these brought to light and succeeded in integrating into economic thought and policy. The article draws on this approach to analyze key human rights principles to discern whether and how these could be articulated in economics. It points out how questioning the assumptions that underlie mainstream economics could have a potentially transformative effect. Finally, the article suggests some steps that can be taken to bring about more human rights-consistent economic thought and practice.
Assessing Austerity: Monitoring the Human Rights Impacts of Fiscal Consolidation
SSRN Electronic Journal
List of Boxes, Tables and Figures 4 Executive Summary 1 | Austerity 10 years on from the crisis: Causes, consequences and policy choices 1.2. Aims and structure of this paper 9 2 | Why a human rights impact assessment of fiscal consolidation? 3 | What human rights are at risk from fiscal consolidation? 3.1. Multiple human rights affected, in multiple ways 3.2. Assessing the net, cumulative effect of adjustment 3.3. Assessing the disparate and intersecting human rights impacts 3.4. Assessing the lifelong effects of fiscal consolidation 4 | How to assess fiscal consolidation? Human rights norms and methods 4.1. Human rights norms and standards in times of fiscal consolidation 4.2. The OPERA Framework: Assessing fiscal consolidation against human rights norms 4.3. Assessing proportionality and making recommendations on alternatives 4.4. What counts during adjustments? Data, indicators and benchmarks 5 | When, who and how to organize the HRIA process? Lessons learned 5.1. Periodic, cyclical and iterative process 5.2. Transparency and the right to information 5.3. Participation not just one step, but a cornerstone 5.4. Independent, interdisciplinary and well-resourced assessment team 5.5. Accountability and policy influence 6 | Conclusion Bibliography Annex I Annex II Acknowledgments Box 1.1. Human rights during sovereign debt crises: Causes, consequences and policy choices Causes: The decision to undertake harmful austerity measures often stems from an overly-simplified diagnosis that "excessive" public spending is what prevents governments from servicing their debt (Boyer, 2012). In reality, the causes of sovereign debt crises emerge not from over-spending, but most often from a combination of quickly eroding revenue streams, bailouts of financial actors, deregulation and failures in financial sector accountability, widening inequalities, depressed wages and demand among low-and middle-income households and other failures in economic globalization (UN IE Debt, 2017; Konzelmann et al., 2016). A human rights approach prompts deeper analysis of the structural causes and abuses of power underlying any sovereign debt crisis-with special emphasis on ensuring accountability from the public and private parties ultimately responsible. 1 Consequences: Cutting social spending or placing the burden of recovery on low-and middle-income families by tax hikes or market-oriented labor and pension reforms is typically taken as collateral damage in the quest for economic "recovery" (usually portrayed as simple return to GDP growth). Yet, austerity has serious and avoidable human rights impacts. Fiscal consolidation poses direct risks to both economic, social and cultural rights and civil and political rights by depriving people of basic goods, liberties, power, voice and opportunities. Likewise, fiscal adjustment often poses indirect risks by undermining the state's capacities to respect, protect and fulfill human rights. (See below and Annex I). A human rights impact assessment of austerity challenges the complacency about these human impacts, and points toward other, more protective possibilities. Choices about alternative policy responses: How countries respond to economic crises, who benefits and who is burdened, are ultimately political choices. A human rights analysis of a sovereign debt crisis compels governments to seek all other alternative policies before embarking on fiscal consolidation measures. Rather than knee-jerk cuts to key social services and state capacities, a litany of feasible policy alternatives exist in most countries to prevent the need for austerity to begin with (See below and Ortiz et al., 2017). 1 1 In line with the UN Guiding Principles on Foreign Debt and Human Rights issued by the UN Independent Expert on Debt (2011: para. 23), HRIAs are incumbent on creditor states and institutions, as well as debtor states.
The Canons of Social and Economic Rights
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2021
Social and economic rights occupy an unsettled place in any global canon of constitutional democracy and human rights. This Article, appearing in a collection of Global Canons in an Age of Uncertainty (S. Choudhry, M. Hailbronner & M. Kumm, eds., OUP) recommends a contender for canonical status, at the same time as it problematizes the search. Insofar as the search for a canon reveals the boundaries of what may be considered exemplary claims of constitutional and democratic practice, the 2000 South African case of Republic of South Africa v. Grootboom is canonical for its treatment of social and economic rights. This Article explores and problematizes the three features of Grootboom-its reasoning, pedigree and visibility-that it argues give it a canonical status, which include the case's apparent resolution of justiciability, its proximity to South Africa's post-apartheid Constitution and Constitutional Court, and its ambivalent legacy for housing rights. Yet Grootboom is not a singular source for establishing and renewing the boundaries of the global canon. Moreover, its legacy is not completely secure. The Article introduces the idea of proto-canons and counter-canons as adding to what should be a worldwide debate about foundational texts, for constitutional democracy and human rights. Indeed, proto-and counter-canons are especially useful categories for charting both the ambitions and marginality of social and economic rights, as well as the hegemony of distinctive visions of constitutional democracy. The Article therefore nominates the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 as a proto-canon for social and economic rights, as crystallizing incipient ideas of freedom from want and an institutionally broad (and non-court centric) vision of realization. It also nominates the 1973 US case of San Antonia School District v. Rodriguez as a counter-canon, as that case marks the interpretive closure, by the Supreme Court, of available arguments for constitutional social and economic rights, and the devolution of the right to education to the states. These protoand counter-canons help us reflect on the highly unsettled constitutional and democratic norms of the present.