The World Bank Group and the International Monetary Fund are under substantial pressure to accept more accountability under international human rights law. This publication sets out the standards by which these international financial institutions are bound under international human rights law as it currently stands. Human rights law is 'living law' and has changed over time, as have international financial institutions, despite their sometimes static approach to their own mandates. However, the World Bank Group and the International Monetary Fund are both starting to recognize more and more the relevance of human rights to the fulfilment of their respective mandates, even if they still maintain, be it to different degrees, that international human rights law is only partly applicable to them. This publication argues that this position is no longer tenable and that human rights law does in fact apply to both international financial institutions.

The rise of globalization and the persistence of global poverty are straining the territorial paradigm of human rights. This book asks if states possess extraterritorial obligations under existing international human rights law to respect and ensure economic, social, and cultural rights and how far those duties extend. Taking a departure point in theory and practice, the book is the first of its kind to analyze the principal cross-cutting legal issues at stake: the legal status of obligations, jurisdiction, causation, division of responsibility, and remedies and accountability. The book focuses specifically on the role of states but also addresses their duties to regulate powerful nonstate actors. The authors demonstrate that many key issues have been resolved or clarified in international law while others remain controversial or await the development of further practice, particularly the scope of jurisdiction and the quantitative dimension of extraterritorial obligations to fulfill.

The rise of globalization and the persistence of global poverty are straining the territorial paradigm of human rights. This book asks if states possess extraterritorial obligations under existing international human rights law to respect and ensure economic, social and cultural rights and how far those duties extend. Taking a departure point in theory and practice, the book is the first of its kind to analyze the principal cross-cutting legal issues at stake: the legal status of obligations, jurisdiction, causation, division of responsibility, and remedies and accountability. The book focuses specifically on the role of states but also addresses their duties to regulate powerful nonstate actors. The authors demonstrate that many key issues have been resolved or clarified in international law while others remain controversial or await the development of further practice, particularly the scope of jurisdiction and the quantitative dimension of extraterritorial obligations to fulfil.

Political leaders, social scientists and lawyers are nowadays paying more attention to two, not necessarily related, issues: concrete measures to reduce poverty and practical steps to respect human rights enshrined in international and national legal systems. The innovative contribution of this volume is its bringing together of these two questions. The authors, who are mainly Latin American, are deeply aware of their own continent's particular history vis-a-vis grave human rights violations on the one hand, and the coexistence of great wealth alongside immense inequality on the other. Law, they argue, is no panacea for the intractable problem of poverty. But it can be an indispensable basis for, and complement to, social mobilization, which, in turn, can be strengthened by certain kinds of socially engaged and critical social science. This is all the more so where economic, social and cultural rights are recognized as being just as important as the older agenda of civil and political entitlements. Vigorous advocacy of compliance with international human rights norms and explicit incorporation and actionability of such standards in national legal frameworks can then play a role in the struggle to reduce, and ultimately eradicate, global poverty and social injustice. The contributors include lawyers and social scientists from a number of disciplines. Largely eschewing a set of country case studies, but paying particular attention to indigenous peoples and their struggles against poverty, they explore a range of important questions relating to the intersection of human rights and poverty, including the relatively new notion of the right to development. An important intellectual contribution breaking new ground in the political struggle to reduce world poverty.