Law Commons^™

Why Central Banks Need To Take Human Rights More Seriously, Daniel D. Bradlow

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Most central bankers think that there is a tenuous connection between the operations of central banks and human rights. Their responsibility is to concentrate on the relatively narrow set of macro-economic variables that are relevant to their mandates and to leave to their country’s political leadership the decisions dealing with the complex and politically sensitive variables that affect the functioning of the economy and society.

This position is no longer tenable. Climate change is forcing the central banking community to rethink their view of their responsibilities. The recent release of the Network for Greening, the Financial System’s first comprehensive report …

Using A Shield As A Sword: Are International Organizations Abusing Their Immunity?, Daniel D. Bradlow

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

The starting point for this paper is that IOs are as subjects of international law. Since IOs do not control territory or a population and so always operate within the jurisdiction of one of their member states, they are vulnerable to interference by their member states. In order to mitigate this risk, IOs have been granted qualified immunity, usually referred to as functional immunity, from the jurisdiction of their member states. For most of the twentieth century, this grant of functional immunity made sense for two reasons.

First, the founding states envisaged that IOs would have limited capacity to act …

Can Parallel Lines Ever Meet? The Strange Case Of The International Standards On Sovereign Debt And Business And Human Rights, Daniel D. Bradlow

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This special issue is a cooperation of the Yale Journal of International Law and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). It emerged from UNCTAD’s work on sovereign debt workouts, specifically from its Working Group on a Sovereign Debt Workout Mechanism (2013 to 2015). The working group developed a Roadmap and Guide for Sovereign Debt Workouts, published in 2015. It proposes an incremental approach to sovereign debt workouts that relies on the continuous, progressive development of sovereign debt restructuring practice. This work has inspired the adoption of Basic Principles for Sovereign Debt Restructuring by the United Nations General …

Development Decision Making And The Content Of International Development Law, Daniel D. Bradlow

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

International development law deals with the rights and duties of states and other actors in the development process. As the consensus view of the development process disintegrated during the 1970s and 1980s, the agreement on the content of international development law also began to break down. Today there are two competing idealized views of development. The first, the traditional view, maintains that development is about economic growth, which can be distinguished from other social, cultural, environmental, and political development issues in society. The second, the modern view, maintains that development is an integrated process of change involving intertwined economic, social, …

The World Bank, The Imf, And Human Rights, Daniel D. Bradlow

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This paper explores the type of human rights obligations of the World Bank and the IMF. It argues that their human rights obligations can be divided into two sets of issues. First is operational issues, which relate to both the promotion and protection of human rights. Second is institutional issues, which deal with the internal rules and procedures of the World Bank and the IMF. The paper concludes that these organizations need to develop a coherent and explicit human rights policy.

Limited Mandates And Intertwined Problems: A New Challenge For The World Bank And The Imf, Daniel D. Bradlow, Claudio Grossman

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

The sovereign states that participated in the establishment of the post-Second World War international order had a specific vision of how international organizations should function. This view was based on two premises. The first premise was that the sovereign state was the most significant actor in the international order. Consequently, only states could join and participate in the affairs of the new international organizations. Furthermore, international organizations were limited in their ability to interfere in the internal affairs of their member states.