Should Human Rights Law Play a Role in Development?

Eric A. Posner

The World Bank Economic Review, 2017, vol. 30, issue Supplement_1, S16-S33

Abstract: Many human rights advocates believe that development agencies—agencies that define their mission as providing economic and technical aid to impoverished countries—should be required to respect and promote human rights law. This style of human rights imperialism should be resisted. While development agencies should obviously comply with domestic law and try to promote good rather than bad outcomes, there is no benefit in holding them to human rights law. Human rights law was designed for states, not for NGOs, and how it would be applied to NGOs is far from obvious. Because of the ambiguity and vast scope of human rights law, the practical effect of these proposals would be to add another layer of bureaucracy to development projects while subjecting those projects to scrutiny by lawyers with little to guide them but their intuitive notions of right and wrong.

JEL-codes: O15 O20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/wber/lhw008 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:wbecrv:v:30:y:2017:i:supplement_1:p:s16-s33.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The World Bank Economic Review is currently edited by Eric Edmonds and Nina Pavcnik

More articles in The World Bank Economic Review from World Bank Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().