At the opening of its 13th session on 1 March 2010, the UN Human Rights Council held a high-level panel discussion on the impact of global economic and financial crises on realization of human rights. The panel was designed to provide a formal contribution to the Working Group of the General Assembly on follow-up to the outcome of the June 2009 UN Conference on the World Financial and Economic Crisis and its Impact on Development. This panel was followed by a side event, co-sponsored by CESR, ESCR-Net and NGLS, on 4 March.
NGLS reported this on the high-level panel discussion and side event:
The high level panel showed strong convergence on what UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay described as the need for an ???urgent shift??? to ensure that stimulus packages and rescue operations do not just salvage the financial system and restore economic growth, but also directly address how individuals are affected, especially in their access to employment and social services. ILO Director-General Juan Somavia raised the same political problem: ???How come there is money to rescue big banks and support economic recovery, but when it comes to job recovery, we don???t have the money ??? we are told to wait another five years???. As fiscal constraints begin to emerge, there is a risk of backsliding to the same old recessionary policies of the past.???
South Centre Executive Director Martin Khor urged governments facing tighter budgets ??? which imply a trade-off about what to cut ??? that the trade-off should ???always side with human rights: protect jobs and social services rather than narrow commercial interests.??? In the same vein, former Secretary-General of Amnesty International Irene Khan emphasized that human rights constitute the ???ethical benchmark??? or ???moral compass??? for testing the validity and effectiveness of any stimulus packages and other short- or long-term measures adopted by governments in response to the crisis.
Lessons learned from the crisis were discussed in greater depth at a Human Rights Council side event organized by NGLS, the Center for Economic and Social Rights (CESR) and ESCR-Net on 4 March. Jo??o Ernesto Christ??folo, a government representative from Brazil (which together with Egypt took the lead on this Human Rights Council initiative) insisted on the UN???s central role in responding to the crisis. Bringing in the human rights dimension must not only be about assessing impacts, but also shaping appropriate responses to the crisis, he said.
Senior UNCTAD economist Richard Kozul-Wright emphasized that the underlying causes of the current crisis were rooted in a dominant policy paradigm of ???market fundamentalism,??? reflected in widespread liberalization, deregulation and privatization policies ??? affecting not only the economy but other spheres of life, including health, education, or post-disaster reconstruction. The resulting ???boom and bust??? cycles of the last 10 or 20 years were an expression of the fragility of the system, characterized by the unsustainable accumulation of debt ??? notably to compensate for a deficiency in global aggregate demand caused in large part by a sharp growth in inequalities and rising shares of national incomes going to profits at the expense of wages. This policy orientation meant a ???capture of state??? that defended the rights of certain groups (financiers, corporations) at the expense of other groups. Human rights advocates, he said, thus have to be aware that behind market fundamentalism lies a ???rights-based??? agenda focusing on a specific category of rights, namely property rights (whether expressed in terms of low taxes for the rich, the right to make windfall profits through socially harmful speculation, or intellectual property rights), over and above other categories of rights. The challenge for the human rights community was how to rethink the role of the State and build a countervailing movement rooted in an alternative ethic based on social justice, solidarity and fairness.
Participants highlighted a range of measures that governments can do ??? even in the midst of the crisis ??? to change course. These included investing in a ???social protection floor,??? making full employment an explicit macroeconomic objective, and re-regulating finance to discourage risky short-term speculation and reward long-term investments in productive employment and other social goals. While countries can use their existing policy space to pursue these objectives much more forcefully, many countries face limitations on what they can achieve on their own.
What does the duty to cooperate internationally imply?Many participants highlighted that global economic crisis had heightened the importance of the duty of international assistance and cooperation, grounded in the UN Charter and human rights instruments such as the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.
Irene Khan stressed that this duty, while legally well founded, is contested politically. Donor countries have a responsibility to respect, protect and fulfil economic and social rights beyond their jurisdiction. Various participants insisted that it is not simply a matter of providing more aid as a form of charity. There is an implication that the aid, trade, investment and foreign policies of more powerful countries ???do no harm??? in other economically weaker countries. When donors ??? or countries with dominant positions in international financial institutions ??? promote or condone conditionalities which in effect force recipient governments to implement policies that cause avoidable human rights retrogressions (whether related to the right to work, food, social protection, health care and education), these more powerful countries could be said to be in violation of their international human rights obligations.
At the high-level panel, Martin Khor had drawn attention to a little talked about right enshrined in the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, namely that ???everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized??? (Art. 28). The crisis was yet another wake-up call that the current international financial architecture is prone to socially devastating crises and suffers from a ???deflationary bias??? whereby many countries are pressured by international financial markets and institutions to pursue recessionary policies when faced with fiscal and balance-of-payments difficulties. This is not compatible with the duties to protect and fulfil social and economic rights. Against pressures for a return to ???business as usual,??? it was suggested that the many proposals for reforming the international financial architecture to support development and social justice could be strengthened if articulated in terms of international human rights obligations.
A pro-active human rights economic agendaAt the high-level panel, Irene Khan had noted that ???the tendency of the human rights movement has been mostly to concentrate on monitoring violations of ESC rights ??? in other words, the aspect of ???respect??? ??? such forced evictions or institutionalized discrimination in employment, education, or housing.??? Comparatively little attention has been given to assessing the impact of public policy on human rights. ???This is partly because it is more difficult to pin down who is accountable for what,??? she said. But some groups, such as the Center for Economic and Social Rights (CESR), were beginning to analyse how human rights can guide economic policies, using multidisciplinary tools and methodologies.
In this respect, CESR Research Director Sally-Anne Way presented at the side event the results of an international NGO survey that undertook a human rights analysis of government responses to the economic crisis in a report entitled ???Bringing Human Rights to Bear in Times of Crisis.??? She emphasized that the report emerged out of a rising concern amongst human rights organizations about the impacts of the food, fuel, housing, climate, water, care and economic crises on the realization of human rights, especially economic and social rights, and the fact that some governments have begun using the economic crisis as an excuse to further abdicate their human rights obligations.
She reiterated that human rights place legal obligations on governments to protect their citizens from harm, as well as to promote their well-being. The report therefore reminds governments, as primary duty-bearers of human rights obligations, are called on under international law, of their duties to respect, protect and fulfill human rights ??? and reiterates that meeting these duties is all the more important in times of crisis. Sally-Anne Way concluded that we need to move beyond the debate between a minimal State and a maximal State towards a rights-fulfilling State that respects, protects and fulfils economic, social and cultural rights as well as civil and political rights.