IFIs and disregard for human rights Sample Clauses

IFIs and disregard for human rights. ‌ While these large IFIs have affected human rights in meaningful ways by changing states’ behavior, it is not necessarily the case that these changes were intended. This is where the IFI literature departs from that discussing third party economic tools and human rights more broadly. According to NGOs such as Human Rights Watch, many international financial institutions claim that they do not have obligations to look after human rights. For example, some of these institutions may claim that they have a “non-political” mandate (xx Xxxxx 2017), insinuating that human rights are not in their jurisdiction – and, by extension, not their concern. A UN-commissioned report on the human rights effects of loan conditionalities indicates that the World Bank has taken steps to improve its human rights record, but that the IMF has taken few steps in that direction, aside from producing a few internal documents questioning the value and potential negative externalities of enforcing liberal economic reforms upon those receiving loans (Furceri, Xxxxxxxx and Ostry 2016). Thus, regarding the point raised by Xxxxxxx and de Soysa, it does not necessarily make sense that states would seek to improve their human rights record in order to receive loans. In their results, the authors find that recipients of loans from the IBRD and XXX need to have low levels of “dissent” in order to get the loans, but they find a null result for other organizations such as the IMF (Xxxxxxx and De Soysa 2009, 493). Unfortunately, the authors do not dwell on why these IFIs might be different – perhaps because the IBRD and XXX are development-focused and therefore more likely to want to negotiate with less repressive states for normative reasons – but it is an important point of consideration. Finally, the authors posit that having access to IFI loans eases the fiscal burden of heavily indebted states and that when these states do not get new loans – and must start paying back – repression increases. The authors state that their results indicate that “(economic) crises rather than the stringency with which conditionalities are applied drive human rights violations” (Xxxxxxx and De Soysa 2009, p. 494). But this is a small distinction. If paying back the loans is what causes repression to increase due to the threat of austerity, then wouldn’t austerity imposed by the IFIs also lead to increased repression? The authors attempt to exonerate the critics of globalization but on this point make a less-tha...