Development Aid and Human Rights Revisited

The first edition of "Development Aid and Human Rights" criticized the international development finance agencies for their failure to include human rights in their assistance to developing countries. This has recently changed: human rights have been explicitly recognized by virtually all donors. However, the linkage of human rights and development aid is today even more controversial than five years ago. From the time it was first introduced, by few bilateral donors, this linkage was in practice punitive: aid is decreased, suspended or cut off because of human rights violations. Increased assistance is not given to governments that improved their human rights performance or strive to do so. Human rights criteria are thus applied only to the governments of aid-receiving countries. The compatibility of aid itself with human rights requirements remains beyond this linkage. Indeed, the donor community is today accused of using human rights as a pretext to decrease aid to developing countries or, at best, to use human rights as a new form of conditionality. This book therefore introduces human rights impact assessment in order to review development aid itself by human rights criteria.