© Nova univerza, 2018
DIGNIT AS
Revija za človekove pravice
Slovenian journal of human rights
ISSN 1408-9653
Making Sovereign Financing and Human Rights Work, Hart Publishing, 2014 
(Dejan Valentinčič)
Juan Pablo Bohoslavsky in Jernej Letnar Černič (ur.)
Article information:
To cite this document:
Pablo Bohoslavsky, J. (2014). Making Sovereign Financing and Human Rights 
Work, Hart Publishing, 2014 (Dejan Valentinčič), Dignitas, št. 61/62, str. 239-
241.
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https://doi.org/ 10.31601/dgnt/61/62-12
Created on: 16. 06. 2019
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DIGNITAS n Making Sovereign Financing and Human Rights Work
The question of the connection between sovereign financing 
and human rights has become particularly topical with the finan-
cial crisis currently underway. Yet the issue has its roots long in 
the past. We cannot be proud of the fact that so little attention has 
been paid to these questions, even today. The present book is in 
fact the first real work to deal with this area in all its complexity. It 
is a book that should have been written a long time ago.
The contributors to this book include well-known professors, 
practitioners, international experts and vigorous young scholars 
from around the world with a variety of academic and profession-
al backgrounds including human rights law, inter national law, fi-
nancial law, corporate law, economics and history, international 
organisations, and a geographical background, covering all conti-
nents. The book’s interdisciplinary and pluralistic approach allows 
questions from different disciplines to be asked and answered in 
order to forge a legal theory more in line with the complex finan-
cial context in which human rights law is supposed to work.
How is the connection between sovereign financing and hu-
man rights generally established? What are the most relevant cas-
es in which sovereign debt can negatively affect human rights? 
Should international and domestic human rights law be applied 
to the sovereign debt realm? If so, in which conditions? Do non-
state financial actors have any human rights obligations when 
they give out loans or is the provision of basic services solely a 
respon sibility of the borrower state? If so, what are these obliga-
tions and from where do they derive? Which forum can enforce 
these obligations and how? These are the central questions the 
contributors deal with.
In the conflict between sovereign financing and human rights, 
the authors provide a very clear answer: human rights should be 
Recenzija
 
Juan Pablo Bohoslavsky and Jernej Letnar Černič (eds.),  
Making Sovereign Financing and Human Rights 
Work, Hart Publishing, 2014 (Dejan Valentinčič)

240
DIGNITAS n Recenzija
in first place. The contributors to this book seek to explain how 
private, official and multilateral loans and financial aid can affect 
human rights in a broad range of causal scenarios. The financial 
community has hardly been under much pressure from the sourc-
es one might expect. What is required is a broad range of measures, 
some of which are admit tedly unlikely to become politically palat-
able to global elites any time soon, along with many more limited 
measures which are already well within reach of effective global 
advo cacy campaigns. This edited collection aims to help fill this 
gap by introducing novel legal theories and analyses of the links 
between sovereign finance debt and human rights from a range 
of perspectives. These chapters include studies of financial com-
plicity, UN sanc tions, ethics, transitional justice, criminal law, in-
solvency proceedings, the millennium devel opment goals, global 
financial architecture, corporations, extraterritoriality, the state of 
necessity, sovereign wealth and hedge funds, project financing, 
state responsibility, inter national financial institutions, the right 
to development, UN initiatives, litigation etc. These chapters are 
then theorised by the editors in an introductory chapter.
Besides the introductory chapter, the book is divided into five 
parts. The first one deals with sovereign financing and gross vio-
lations of political and civil human rights, the second with debt 
crises and social and economic rights, the third with specific fi-
nancial actors and instruments, along with novel approaches, the 
fourth presents several case studies detailing how in different con-
texts and with reference to a diversity of financial instruments hu-
man rights have been negatively affected by sovereign debt, while 
the fifth part presents various case studies from Africa, Asia, South 
America and Europe.
In July 2012 the UN Human Rights Council finally issued its 
own guidelines on foreign debt and human rights, yet much re-
mains to be done to promote a better under standing of the legal 
and economic implications of the interface between finance and 
human rights. This book will both contribute to that understand-
ing and assist practition ers in their everyday work.
The book seeks to cover a wide, almost thorough, range of pos-
sible interlinks between sovereign financing and human rights. It 
is to be hoped that this publication marks the beginning of a new 
scholarly phase in which more sophisticated, finan cially literate, 
critical and informed analyses of the impacts of international eco-

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DIGNITAS n Making Sovereign Financing and Human Rights Work
nomic and financial systems will be brought to bear upon efforts 
to promote respect for human rights by financial and other actors 
that have long been highly resistant to such concerns. A variety of 
actors, financial instruments and human rights is studied by the 
contributors, but a common thread permeates all of them: sover-
eign financing negatively affects human rights. With the expecta-
tion of finding common roots, patterns and characteristics in the 
problems illustrated by the contributors, this book offers an in-
depth starting point for future discussions while seeking to facili-
tate a better under standing of the colossal encounter of sovereign 
financing and human rights, the dilemmas that such a relation-
ship triggers and proposals for a discussion of conceptual tools to 
make this relationship always work in favour of human rights.

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DIGNITAS n Recenzija