Juan Pablo Bohoslavsky

Jernej Letnar Cernic

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.

Making Sovereign Financing and Human Rights Work

Karinna Fernández

Sebastián Smart

With a focus on Chile, this book demonstrates, with theoretical arguments and empirical studies, that focusing on the behavior of economic actors of the dictatorship is crucial to achieve basic objectives in terms of justice, memory, reparation, and non-repetition measures.

An Unequal Country by Force

Pinochet's Economic Accomplices

Kunibert Raffer

Contributes to a better understanding of the policy, economic, and legal options of countries struggling with debt problems.

What Have We Learned?

Sovereign Debt Crises

Carlos Espósito

Yuefen Li

The regulation of sovereign financing is a highly topical and significant issue, in the light of continuing global financial turmoil. This book assesses the role of international law in sovereign financing, addressing this issue from both legal and economic standpoints. It takes as a starting point the recent report 'Principles on Responsible Sovereign Lending and Borrowing' by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). This report was endorsed by the United Nations General Assembly in its December 2011 Resolution on Debt, which emphasized the need for creditors and debtors to share responsibility for preventing unsustainable debt situations and encouraged all stakeholders to pursue the ongoing discussions within the framework of the UNCTAD Initiative. Investigating the legal and economic basis for the principles which were articulated in the report, the book develops a detailed and nuanced analysis of the controversial and complex issues they raise, including those concerning finance and credit rating agencies, contingent liabilities, debt management, corruption, fiduciary relations and duties, Collective Action Clauses, and the role of the EU and UN. Ultimately, it argues that the principles elaborated in the report correspond with general principles of international law, which provide a strong, pre-existing foundation upon which to build responsible principles for sovereign financing.

The UNCTAD Principles on Responsible Sovereign Lending and Borrowing

Sovereign Financing and International Law

In response to continuing global financial turmoil, the UN Conference for Trade and Development has produced a set of principles to govern future sovereign financing. This book expands on these principles from a legal and economic perspective to analyse how sovereign financing can be regulated to prevent similar debt crises from occurring again.

Juan Pablo Bohoslavsky

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