Before addressing the obligations following from existing international human rights law as it relates to the WBG and the IMF, this chapter illustrates how both of these IFIs present themselves today in relation to the links between their respective mandates and international human rights. This is undertaken to make it clear that discussing the obligations following from existing human rights law and the attribution of conduct that violates these norms in Chapters 3 and 4 is not a matter of imposing something externally upon IFIs, but links to discussions underway in both IFIs.

OFFICIAL WBG POSITION

The WBG underlines in its own recent policy statements that internal developments have shown ‘growing recognition of the need for the Bank to address human rights in a more explicit fashion’ and that there ‘have been significant advances in the Bank's thinking on this issue’. The evidence provided relates to the Bank's pronouncements from as early as 1998 on human rights, which contained statements about how the Bank supports the realisation of human rights and how it believes that ‘creating the conditions for the attainment of human rights is a central and irreducible goal of development’. The Bank's official statements refer to several developments outside the Bank, such as the 2003 UN Common Understanding on a Human Rights Based Approach to Development; the Secretary General's 2005 report In Larger Freedom; and the findings of the 2006 World Development Report Equity and Development. In the words of the Bank, ‘[t]he World Development Report 2006 explores the ways in which structural and distributional inequalities can hinder development, and grounds equity in two basic principles: Equality of opportunity and the avoidance of absolute deprivation, both of which have human rights dimensions’.4 Further to this, the Bank refers to, inter alia, its cooperation with the Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights on several initiatives including, for example, supporting countries to take human rights considerations into account in the preparation of their poverty reduction strategies, as well as with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Development Assistance Committee (DAC).