Wednesday, November 06, 2013

Trade Agreement and Mandatory Human Rights Impact Assessment

Evaluation of trade agreements have been made in economic terms. But the impact of trade agreements is not limited to economic life. They have human rights dimensions in many aspects. For instance, trade agreements containing the TRIPS-plus provisons may affect the right to access to essential medicine, the right to food and more broadly the right to science and culture, which is protected by the Article 27(1) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. So the UN human rights bodies have tried to develop and propose human rights impact assessments (HRIA) of trade agreements (See The Future of Human RightsImpact Assessments of Trade Agreements).