Money Matters: Finance and Human Rights

The OxHRH is pleased to launch its summer 2014 essay competition! One lucky winner will receive a copy of “Making Sovereign Financing and Human Rights Work,” and will have the chance to see their work published on the OxHRH website and social media. We will also publish submissions which the judges to consider to be of high merit.

To enter, simply submit an article, of 500-700 words, on the theme: “Finance and Human Rights.” Entries must be the author’s own work, and must not have previously been submitted or published. The deadline for submission is midnight on 25th July, so get writing!

Entries are to be sent to oxfordhumanrightshub@law.ox.ac.uk. Please include your name and “Finance and Human Rights” in the subject heading.

Best of luck!

The Oxford Human Rights Hub team.

Making Sovereign Financing and Human Rights Work

Edited by Juan Pablo Bohoslavsky and 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 institutions 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.