Margot E. Salomon

From NIEO to Now and the Unfinishable Story of Economic Justice

Why have attempts to bring development aspirations to bear on international law over a period of 50 years come to far less than any reasonable person would hope? The early claims for a New International Economic Order and permanent sovereignty by developing countries over their natural resources, efforts to delineate a body of international development law, followed by the affirmation of a human right to development, were all attempts to have economic justice reflected in international law. Figures on world poverty and inequality suggest that international law accommodated no such restructuring. This article explores why it is international law has failed the poor of the world, and what interests it has served in their stead.

Towards a just institutional order: a commentary on the first session of the UN Task Force on the Right to Development

A novel mechanism that brings together human rights experts with the representatives of the international development, finance and trade institutions was recently established within the United Nations (UN) under the auspices of the Working Group on the Right to Development. At its first session, this High-Level Task Force adopted a range of recommendations on challenges to the Millennium Development Goals and on the importance of human rights impact assessments. In so doing, it took some initial steps towards integrating the international law of human rights, including the framework provided by the 1986 UN Declaration on the Right to Development, into the priority areas of these other international actors. The aim of this commentary is to provide insight into the conclusions adopted by the Task Force and to highlight the contribution of the human right to development to the topics under its consideration. It also seeks to reflect on the significance of human rights law to issues that were tabled, such as, accountability for human rights at the international level, international cooperation, economic growth, and trade-offs in the allocation of resources. In concluding that the Task Force must face head on the impediments to the realisation of human rights posed by the institutional arrangements for the governance of the international economic order, the article ends by offering suggestions for its future work.

Better Development Decision-making: Applying International Human Rights Law to Neoclassical Economics

This paper aims to demonstrate that a human rights-compliant normative approach offers solutions to some of the specific areas of concern for economic decision-making in the context of development, as well as for meeting the requirements of human rights. The authors, an international lawyer and economist respectively, draw on the doctrines that inform international human rights law in the area of socio-economic rights and by providing a careful construction that meets the didactic demands of a cross-disciplinary inquiry, reveal how the externally-generated ethical criteria of international human rights law provide welfare economics with the justice-centred guidance it lacks, moving it beyond the conventional premises of economic efficiency and aggregate social utility. The merits of this study transcend that of academic pursuit: most international organisations favour mainstream economics with development economists adopting the value judgments and allocation efficiency principles of neoclassical welfare economics. Integrating the normative demands of human rights into mainstream economic thinking and decision-making may thus offer international development and financial institutions insights that help set alternative norms and value judgments that can act as an integral complement to welfare economic analysis.