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	Auditing Economic Policy for Human Rights by Radhika Balakrishnan, Diane Elson, James Heintz Center for Women's Global Leadership, Carter Center   Auditing Economic Policy for Human Rights: A guide for activists and advocates, by Radhika Balakrishnan, Diane Elson, James Heintz and Jonah Walters from the Center for Women's Global Leadership.   Macroeconomic policy affects all of us, no matter how removed our lives seem to be from the heights of the policy-making elite. Macroeconomics is the branch of economics that studies the behavior and performance of an economy as a whole. It focuses on the aggregate changes in the economy such as unemployment, rate of growth of Gross Domestic Product and inflation.   The prices of the goods we buy, the wages we earn at work, the working conditions we endure, the level of unpaid work we perform, the quality of the public services, including medical care, we access, even how long we live—all these things, to a certain extent, are shaped by macroeconomic policy.   Understanding and intervening in macroeconomic policy, then, is a key priority for activists concerned with building a more just and equitable world. The realization of rights is fundamentally a political struggle for a different social and economic order.   The prevailing dominant methodology for evaluating macroeconomic policy is deeply flawed. This methodology is drawn from neoclassical economics—the intellectual basis for neoliberal policy—and is concerned, first and foremost, with questions of effi-ciency and market competition.   But this framework is severely limited when it comes to understanding the effects of economic inequality on social wellbeing. According to traditional neoclassical logic, competitive markets are the best tool for guiding social outcomes, because they are supposedly efficient, whereas the actions of governments are typically presumed to entail the imposition of costs that would create a loss of efficiency.   In the jargon of neoclassical economics, government actions typically “dis-tort” the operation of economies. In the mainstream framework, then, macroeconomic policies are evaluated according to how well they leave competitive markets alone, free from government impositions.   In the post-2008 context, it strains the limits of credibility to argue that all markets are efficient, much less that they guarantee lives with dignity and capabilities for every-one when left to their own devices. It’s true that markets can distribute jobs, goods, services, and capital throughout society at large. But they don’t necessarily do so equitably.   Left on their own, markets, when operating in a context of power imbalances, may create conditions of widespread unemployment (“labor market flexibility,” in the neoclassical vernacular) and underemployment, suppressed wages, ineffective public services, commodity shortages, and, of course, periodic financial crisis, which dispro-portionately harm the most vulnerable.   In this guide, we propose an alternative approach, based on human rights. The human rights approach constitutes an alternative evaluative and ethical frame-work for assessing economic policies and outcomes.   The goals of social justice are expressed in terms of the realization of rights—both civil and political rights and also economic, social, and cultural rights.   The human rights approach allows for a complex interaction between individual rights, collective rights, and collective action. It focuses on substantive freedoms (not just freedom in law, but freedoms of individuals, seen as active agents of change, rather than as passive recipients of dispensed benefits) and equality for realized outcomes, not just opportunities.   It sees economic policy as a social and political process that should conform to human rights standards and laws, not as a purely technocratic exercise.   It incorporates an understanding of the paradoxical character of the state, recognizing that states can both enable and deny social justice and that individuals need protection against misuse of state power, as well as requiring the power of the state to be harnessed to realize individual rights.   Most importantly, it is consistent with an international legal framework and provides formal mechanisms through which policy can be contested and the need for legal accountability can be raised.   There are profound differences between prevailing assessment practices and the evaluative methodology we are proposing based on human rights.   Most importantly for activists, our methodology offers a set of tools for auditing macroeconomic policy based on internationally accepted and legally binding human rights standards on a variety of issues that have been debated and agreed upon by governments since 1948.   In this way, activists can muster powerful arguments against a range of macroeconomic policies, using a framework already ratified and accepted by the vast majority of the world’s countries, with a well-developed infrastructure for making claims and pressing for compliance.   It’s not hard to imagine the utility of such a framework for activists engaged in any number of social struggles, from the battle over universal healthcare, to union drives in major industries, to the emerging campaigns for “peoples’ audits” of privately-held public debt.   One important aspect of this framework is that it returns power to the people whose lives are caught up in macroeconomic processes that are too often outside of their control but which influence them deeply.   The discourse and procedures of human rights position people as “rights holders,” especially those who are undervalued or who suffer discrimination, disadvantage, and exclusion.   The human rights framework positions people as active agents, claiming what is rightfully theirs, not merely as victims asking for charitable handouts. It has an ethical and legal authority absent from most economic analysis.   The worst that an economist can say of a government’s budget is that it is imprudent, unsound, unsustainable, or inefficient, while the human rights advocate can say that it fails to comply with state obligations and violates human rights.   This may apply even if the budget is deemed to be prudent, sound, sustainable, and efficient by economists. The human rights framework allows us to move beyond a narrow focus on things like Gross Domestic Product (GDP) or income when evaluating economic outcomes.   Instead, the human rights framework stresses the progressive realization of economic and social rights over time. Advances in social justice are achieved when the enjoyment of the rights to an adequate standard of living, education, health, work, and social security improves over time.   http://forum.cartercenter.org/media/auditing-economic-policy-human-rights-guide-activists-and-advocates Visit the related web page
	The pandemic of inequality by Juan Pablo Bohoslavsky Open Global Rights   Latin America is the most unequal region in the world, and it is also, as of September 2020, the one that has the most Covid-19 victims.   What do inequalities, Covid-19, and human rights have to do with each other? Persistent inequalities explain why the virus and the recession are affecting disadvantaged groups. At the same time, we are discouraged from aspiring to return to the pre-Covid-19 state. This article presents the main arguments of the collective book on Covid-19 and human rights that, prefaced by Michelle Bachelet, has just been published in Argentina.   The disease, measures to contain it, and its social and economic effects impact lower-income people or those in other vulnerable groups at a higher rate and exposes them to multi-faceted and intersectional discrimination.   The poor are infected and die more from Covid-19 and have fewer resources to deal with the economic recession in Latin America, which is estimated to have thirty million more poor people by the end of 2020. And if they are women, migrants, refugees, people with disabilities, people in confinement contexts, adults and older adults, children or adolescents, or belong to a racial, ethnic, religious, linguistic, or sexual minority, the impact on their shoulders is multiplied.   But it is not the virus that discriminates, but the people and the social and economic infrastructure that favors some (few) people over others (many). The withdrawal of States in areas that are deeply sensitive to human rights—such as housing, health and education—an economic-legal system that legitimizes the concentration of capital to the point of paroxysm; a labor market that institutionalizes exploitation; the increasing protection of monopolistic patents; the naturalization of regressive fiscal policies; as well as the commodification of economic and social rights explain a scenario in which inequalities and consequent poverty are associated with both higher levels of contagion and lethality of Covid-19, in addition to the violation of social and economic rights.   Consider, for example, the feasibility of the sanitary recommendation to wash hands regularly and stay at home for a large part of the population that does not have access to safe drinking water or adequate housing.   Or that essential purchases are made online when a high percentage of the population does not have access to a credit card, or to not travel by public transport when private transportation options are not available. Or that schooling continues by digital means, when a high percentage of the population has extremely limited access to the internet.   Thus, it should not be surprising that the notion of strategic sovereignty is emerging, which now focuses on the responsibility and power of national states to effectively protect the health of the population and guarantee the provision of essential goods and services and with it, social reproduction.   It would be an economic model focused on people's needs and human rights rather than on the expansion of capital. This notion of strategic sovereignty challenges some pacts forged during hyperglobalization, such as the unlimited flow of international trade; the protection of foreign investment; the free movement of people around the world; the inviolability of intellectual patents; the deregulation of financial capital; the financialization of virtually all aspects of life, labor flexibility; the minimization of social protection systems; short-term fiscal discipline; and the commodification of essential public services such as health. Reversing these trends does not seem to be bad news for human rights.   Indeed, as Ignacio Ramonet warns, the screams of agony of the thousands of sick people who die from not having beds in intensive care units will long condemn fans of privatizations, cuts, and austerity policies. WHO has already identified each of the low-income countries that followed the IMF's recommendation over the past three years to cut or freeze public employment as countries experiencing critical deficits in health workers.   Whether the new normal is an oxymoron that will continue to benefit elites or if it instead involves a true transformative agenda depends on all of us. It is something that is built day-by-day, first of all, from the confrontation of ideas.   We cannot overestimate the significance of imagining a transformative agenda and putting into words a human rights perspective to confront the pandemic.   Indeed, when we note that countries with similar GDP have very different results in the protection of the rights to life and health, it is obvious that, in addition to having resources, States need to deploy "good governance", in which the notion of human rights must be a central part.   In order to weigh the costs and benefits of protecting and promoting human rights, we must be concrete and articulate. This is evident when we study the impact of health policies on human rights beyond life and physical health. In the face of the medical paradigm – which favors the biological aspects and survival of people – as a legitimate discourse that influences regulations, practice models, and social representations, another more holistic one emerges.   To what extent is it legitimate to forsake freedoms on the altar of a strictly sanitarist vision? International human rights law provides precise guidelines for answering this fundamental question, and this is one of the central points addressed in the new book Covid-19 and human rights: The pandemic of inequality.   The large economic slowdown, which has exacerbated the economic challenges that several countries in Latin America were already facing in February 2020, has led to an increase in poverty and a decline in economic and social rights. In this context, only elites are capable of resilience in the face of sudden macroeconomic changes. Again we see that, beyond the urgent actions that should be taken to serve the population most affected by the crisis, a transformative agenda needs to be on the discussion table.   Human rights have a scientific, legal, and political purpose. They can shed light on the intricate economic, financial, social, and legal processes that perpetuate inequalities. It is true that the effectiveness of human rights is limited. The levels of poverty and inequalities that exist in the world, and the presidents who suggest taking toxic substances to combat Covid-19 or who recommend not using face masks, without entailing any legal consequences, give us an indication of the impact of human rights in the real world.   But this should not lead us to abandon the cause of human rights, but precisely to strengthen its system of protection which, to a large extent, requires reforming the foundations of the prevailing economic system. To this end, it is essential to investigate, report, and denounce the relationships between the pandemic, inequalities, and human rights.   * Juan Pablo Bohoslavsky is a researcher at the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research of Argentina (CONICET) at the National University of Río Negro. Between 2014 and 2020 he was an independent expert on debt and human rights at the UN.   http://www.openglobalrights.org/the-pandemic-of-inequality/ Visit the related web page
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