Social Watch E-Newsletter - Issue 173 - June 20, 2014

“The need of a multilateral dept dispute resolution mechanism was highlighted by the financial crisis of 2008 and the debt crises that it unleashed in several European countries. It is dramatically emphasized in these days by the tragic fact that a country like Argentina that is fighting hard to lift its people out of poverty, reconstruct the national economy destroyed by two decades of neoliberalism and recover the trust of the international financial markets is being attacked by unethical “vulture funds” and might be even forced into default by a resolution over its sovereign debt taken by the justice system of another country. This does not only threatens to submerge millions of Argentinians back into poverty but might even put into risk the whole international financial system” said Roberto Bissio, on behalf of Social Watch, during the Special Session of Trade and Development Board organized by UNCTAD Geneva, 17 June 2014. Read more

A new GPF working paper, jointly published with Brot für die Welt and MISEREOR, gives an overview of the debate around how to create an international legally binding instrument to hold transnational corporations accountable for human rights abuses. The scope reaches early efforts to formulate the UN Code of Conduct to the current initiative for a binding Treaty on Business and Human Rights.
The paper particularly focuses on the responses by TNCs and their leading interest groups to the various UN initiatives, specifies the key actors and their objectives. In this context it also highlights features of the interplay between business demands and the evolution of regulatory debates at the UN. This provides an indication of the degree of influence that corporate actors exert and their ability – in cooperation with some powerful UN member states – to prevent international binding rules for TNCs at the UN.
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There is almost no dispute that the worst performance of all Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) was registered on MDG 8, the Global Partnership for Development. The impending deliberations to shape the post-2015 development agenda offers a high level political opportunity to correct that imbalance.
For that, it is important to avoid treading the same path of the MDG approach. The initial blueprint for the MDGs entirely neglected mention of the means of implementation necessary in the form of international support. Since it was clear that developing countries would never get on board with an agenda that would harshly judge their progress in improving certain quantifiable indicators without correlative commitments of financial support to help achieve them, one more goal was added, and this was Goal 8 on the Global Partnership. Accepting this approach condoned the methodological nonsense of putting means of implementation as a category equivalent to the goals they should serve. It condemned finance for development to the constraints of a format that required simplified, succinct, one-size-fits-all statements that could never capture the breadth, complexity and diversity needed for development finance to work. Read more

The Post-2015 Human Rights Caucus was born in 2013 as a cross-constituency coalition of development, environment, trade union, feminist and human rights organizations worldwide to lay out a roadmap for embedding human rights into the core of the post-2015 sustainable development agenda. As the Open Working Group’s (OWG) efforts near completion and the full-blown political negotiations begin, the Post-2015 Human Rights Caucus has developed this Litmus Test to be used to evaluate whether proposals for the post-2015 framework respect and reflect pre-existing human rights norms, standards and commitments, in line with the Rio+20 agreement that sustainable development goals be “consistent with international law”. This series of questions and criteria not only clearly articulate our bottom-line expectations for the outcomes of the post-2015 sustainable development process, but also provides a unique tool for all those involved to more objectively assess whether post-2015 proposals truly encapsulate what the UN Secretary General envisioned as “a far-reaching vision of the future firmly anchored in human rights.” Read more