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	The business and human rights dimension of sustainable development by UN Office for Human Rights, agencies   The business and human rights dimension of sustainable development: Embedding “Protect, Respect and Remedy” in SDGs implementation.   Key recommendations to Governments and businesses from the UN Working Group on Business and Human Rights.   Human rights are essential to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Simply put, a development path in which human rights are not respected and protected cannot be sustainable, and would render the notion of sustainable development meaningless.   Rightly, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is explicitly grounded in the UN Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, international human rights and labour rights treaties and other instruments, stating that the aim of the SDGs is to “realize the human rights of all”. The SDGs themselves and their targets also cover a wide range of issues that mirror international human rights and labour standards.   Many of the SDGs relate closely to economic, social and cultural rights, including rights focused on health, education, food, shelter, alongside the rights of specific groups such as women, children and indigenous peoples.   In addition, SDG 16 on the need for peaceful, just and inclusive societies emphasizes key civil and political rights, including personal security, access to justice, and fundamental freedoms.   The 2030 Agenda emphasizes that the business sector is a key partner for the United Nations and governments in achieving the SDGs. Notably goal 17 speaks of revitalizing global partnerships for sustainable development, including public-private partnerships.   Paragraph 67 of the 2030 Agenda calls on “all businesses to apply their creativity and innovation to solving sustainable development challenges” and commits States to “foster a dynamic and well-functioning business sector, while protecting labour rights and environmental and health standards in accordance with international standards and agreements and other ongoing related initiatives, such as the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights...”   Respect for human rights must be a cornerstone when envisioning the role that business will play in the pursuit of the SDGs. As a universally agreed global standard for States and companies to ensure that business and investment do not come at the cost of human rights, the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights provide an important part of the solution to this challenge.   Based on the three pillars of “Protect, Respect and Remedy”, they clarify that: States have a duty to protect human rights, including against abuse by business; businesses have a responsibility to respect human rights throughout their activities and business relationships; and that victims of business-related human rights impacts must have access to remedy.   The corporate responsibility to respect human rights applies to all businesses regardless of their size, sector, operational context, ownership and structure.   Both the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Addis Ababa Action Agenda explicitly cite the Guiding Principles and the need to protect rights in the context of private sector contributions to solving sustainable development challenges. Much work remains to be done, however, to translate the SDGs into action by States and businesses in a manner that is consistent with international human rights standards. This includes ensuring that partnership activities involving the business sector are based on respect for human rights.   * Access the 10 key recommendations to Governments and businesses from the UN Working Group on Business and Human Rights: http://bit.ly/2h5RYnX http://www.business-humanrights.org/en/live-un-forum-on-business-human-rights-2017 http://www.business-humanrights.org/en/third-un-intergovt-working-group-session-on-proposed-business-human-rights-treaty-23-27-oct   New online database explores links between human rights and sustainable development goals. (OHCHR)   A new interactive database offers users a chance to visually check on progress on achieving both sustainable development and human rights goals across the globe.   The database was developed by the Danish Institute for Human Rights (DIHR). It is based on more than 50,000 recommendations made during the the Universal Periodic Review (UPR). The UPR is a peer-review mechanism of the UN Human Rights Council that looks at the human rights situation on the ground for each of the United Nation’s 193 Member States. At the end of each review, recommendations are issued to improve human rights before the next review. The reviews take place once every 4.5 years.   Using an algorithm developed and trained by the DIHR team, the recommendations are then weighted and linked to specific sustainable development goals (SDG), giving States and others a concrete way of seeing human rights linked with development, said Birgitte Feiring from the DIHR.   “UPR recommendations are important,” she said. “They originate from a peer mechanism and a number of recommendations are accepted by recipient states, implying their intention and willingness to implement these recommendations. The database allows such states to address these recommendations as part of their SDG implementation, thereby having an integrated approach towards achieving SDGs and human rights.”   For example, users of the database can look at a specific country or region and see what SDGs are of most concern. The database can display information graphically, as well as be investigated via each SDG.   The database also uses information from the UN Human Rights Office Universal Human Rights Index (UHRI), which compiles recommendations from all UN human rights mechanisms. This helps users gain access to recommendations and observations on specific human rights issues addressed to States.   http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/UPRNewDatabase.aspx   * Access the database: http://index.humanrights.omega.oitudv.dk/   Monitoring corruption and anti-corruption in the Sustainable Development Goals. (Transparency International)   As part of its follow-up and review mechanisms for the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), member states are encouraged to conduct regular national reviews of progress made towards the achievement of these goals through an inclusive, voluntary and country-led process. This 100 page guide is intended to explain the role of civil society organisations in monitoring corruption in the SDGs, as well as how to identify potential indicators and data sources for this purpose. Throughout the guide, there are country examples of indicator selection, inclusive follow-up review processes and approaches to corruption monitoring: http://bit.ly/2xQGdvc   http://www.cesr.org/human-rights-sustainable-development http://sdg.iisd.org/news/ http://www.unric.org/en/unric-library/29897 http://www.odi.org/projects/2833-leave-no-one-behind http://bit.ly/2xMh4jv Visit the related web page
	The IMF’s hostility to concepts such as universal social protection by Peter Bakvis ITUC, Development Pathways   Oct. 2017   Trade Unions call on IFIs to support Global Wage Rise. (ITUC)   On the eve of the annual meetings of the IMF and World Bank (Washington, 13-15 October 2017), the ITUC and its Global Unions partners are calling on the international financial institutions to help boost the incomes of working people around the world by supporting a strengthening of weakened collective bargaining rights and an expansion of universal social protection.   ITUC General Secretary Sharan Burrow said, “A rise of wages will do much to reverse the fall in labour’s income share experienced in most countries, stop the trend of increasing inequality and provide the increase in global demand needed to sustain economic recovery.” She called attention to the IMF Chief Economist’s assessment on 10 October that the global recovery is incomplete due to the drag on the global economy caused by several years of wage stagnation.   Burrow noted that even though most countries are expected to experience positive economic growth this year, many countries have far from acceptable levels of employment and labour income. In particular, thirty-four emerging and developing economies will, according to IMF projections, be in a situation of negative per capita income growth in 2017.   The ITUC General Secretary called on the IMF to end its support for labour market deregulation, an important contributor to income inequality, and to follow the example of most other international institutions, including the ILO and the World Bank, that have endorsed universal social protection.   Burrow urged both institutions to increase their efforts to achieve gender equality and a just transition to a sustainable, low-carbon economy. She also called on the World Bank to end its misplaced emphasis of public private partnerships, instead of quality public services, because of PPPs’ detrimental impacts on public finances, access to services and working conditions.   Burrow also called on the World Bank to proceed with the implementation of its new labour safeguard, adopted fourteen months ago, in such a manner that all activities financed by the Bank comply with recognised international workers’ rights.   The ITUC and its Global Unions partners submitted this statement to the heads and executive directors of the IMF and World Bank: http://bit.ly/2qXuaur http://bit.ly/2mlRpsv   Sept. 2017   The IMF’s hostility to concepts such as universal social protection, by Peter Bakvis. (Development Pathways)   The IMF’s Independent Evaluation Office rarely lives up to its pretention to operate in real independence from the Fund, as its name implies, writes Peter Bavkis.   One is hard-pressed to cite IEO reports that embrace thorough critiques of IMF policies, despite their frequency in academic circles and among civil society organisations, or that call for substantial revamping of policies and practices. The IEO report The IMF and Social Protection fits into this pattern.   However, by operating as a sounding board for IMF officials (ex-staffers make up most of its personnel), the 16-year-old IEO produces reports that often reveal useful information about Fund operations and staff attitudes. From that point of view, the report on social protection does not disappoint. Among other things, it provides a detailed account of the IMF’s hostility to concepts such as universal social protection.   Perhaps most surprising, for those who have not followed the IMF’s evolution in recent years, is the invitation to the Fund to question whether its endorsement in 2015 of the Sustainable Development Goals is compatible with its reaffirmed support for narrowly targeted safety nets.   Those of us in the trade union movement who have encouraged the international financial institutions (IFIs) to support UN-inspired initiatives such as the Social Protection Floor have found the IMF to be a reluctant participant, at best. In 2010, the Fund announced joint work with the ILO to identify “fiscal space” for financing national floors but, after making a serious effort in only one country (Mozambique), it abandoned the collaboration three years later.   In 2012, the IMF was invited to join a Social Protection Inter-Agency Coordination Board, created at the behest of the G20 for expanding social protection coverage, but it declined to participate in all but a few of the meetings, even when they took place in New York where the IMF has permanent representation.   It is not a lack of involvement in social protection issues that explains this reluctance but, rather, the fact that the IMF has increasingly been the odd man out in its attitude to social protection. On the basis of interviews with (unidentified) Fund staff, the report reveals strong antipathy at the IMF towards cooperating on social protection issues with the ILO and other UN agencies. It states that the IMF’s targeting approach does not mesh well with the “rights-based approach” to social protection espoused by the other agencies.   The IMF’s suspicion of other agencies’ motives extends even to its sister IFI, the World Bank. In 2015, the Bank joined with the ILO to endorse the objective of universal social protection, which, the IEO asserts, “could complicate future collaboration” with the IMF. However reassuringly (for the Fund), the report states that so far it has “not seen a departure from the Bank’s standard advice” on the design of social safety nets, which presumably includes the type of targeting favoured by the Fund.   It also admits that, because the IMF has no in-depth expertise in social protection, it has no choice but to continue to cooperate “at the least … with the World Bank”.   The IMF’s perspective, as the report explains, is driven by a focus on fiscal cost. Thus, as regards old-age pensions, the IMF has not been interested in “social issues” such as coverage or replacement rates but rather “macro-critical issues … such as fiscal sustainability and the short-term expenditure burden”. The need to reduce fiscal costs above all else also explains the emphasis on targeting social safety nets to the poorest.   Although the IEO’s analysis ends in 2015, an IMF policy paper on social safeguards in low-income countries released in June makes clear that strict targeting of social assistance so as to “narrowly cover the needs of the most vulnerable” remains the central focus of the Fund’s approach.   Whether its emphasis on narrow targeting means that assistance actually goes to those who need it most is something that both the IEO report and the social safeguards policy paper decline to examine. Ample evidence exists to show that the proxy means tests promoted by the IFIs for targeting in developing countries typically exclude 50 per cent or more of those who should be eligible by virtue of their income level.   The negative effects of such policies have been felt in IMF borrowing countries. In Tunisia, which began the first of two loans in 2013, social expenditures at the end of the first programme were 14 per cent below the symbolic social spending floor in the lending agreement. An IMF staff report blames the missed target on failures of the delivery mechanism for the “well-targeted social safety net” that was supposed to mitigate the impact of increased energy prices on low-income people.   In a loan to Mongolia approved in May 2017, the IMF insisted on better targeting of the national universal child cash benefit to replace a previous universal benefit.   According to an analysis by two UN agencies, the programme was particularly effective in reducing poverty among Mongolia’s rural families, many of whom had not received benefits from an earlier selective scheme due to “exclusion errors associated with proxy means testing”.   While making clear that the IMF disassociates itself from agencies that support so-called rights-based approaches to social protection, neither the IEO report nor the social safeguards paper attempt to determine whether support for narrow targeting has been effective in reducing poverty and inequality, despite the attention the Fund has given to these issues in pronouncements. The IEO declines, because of “conceptual and measurement problems”, to assess whether IMF programmes led to increased social protection, as Fund officials have frequently claimed.   A preferred IMF tool in developing countries has been to include “indicative targets” such as social spending floors in lending programmes. Although the targets appear in the conditionality tables of IMF loan reports, they are not binding and thus have no impact on loan disbursements when not attained (as was the case in Tunisia in 2015), contrary to hard conditions on items such as total government spending ceilings or deficit floors.   Interestingly, the social safeguards paper mentions that 20 per cent of IMF mission chiefs supported converting social spending targets into binding loan conditionality, but neither the policy paper nor the IEO report retain this suggestion.   Finally, without making an explicit recommendation, the IEO report seems to question the wisdom of the IMF having supported the Sustainable Development Goals: “The IMF’s endorsement of the SDGs has raised questions about consistency with its continued support for targeted (means-tested) social protection schemes.” It may be recalled that SDG target 1.3 includes the goal of social protection for all. http://bit.ly/2gDEKCf Visit the related web page
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