In an age of globalization, free trade should be synonymous with prosperity for all. Yet too often, small farmers, indigenous peoples, people with HIV, and others are left out of the picture. This book proposes a new way to make free trade work for all people. It examines how trade pacts can benefit people, but can also threaten their basic human rights to access food, medicines, and education, or to protect their cultural heritage. It develops a step-by-step process to identify the human impacts of trade before trade pacts are finalized. A case study examines the impact of a US-Central American trade agreement on access to medicines in Costa Rica, to demonstrate how the step-by-step process works in practice. The process works, but more efforts are needed to make sure such assessments of trade policies become standard practice. Human rights NGOs and academics, as well as governments, should lead the way in the future. The Future of Human Rights Impact Assessments of Trade Agreements is important for all people who believe that globalization can do more, not just for corporations and the economy, but for everyone, even the poorest.

This article will examine key issues associated with conducting human rights impact assessments (HRIAs) of international trade agreements. It records the widespread calls for such HRIAs by relevant actors, but highlights the fact that limited attempts have so far been made to explore important issues concerning their design and intrinsic value. It therefore poses some key questions which need to be considered in the development of appropriate methodologies and explores the extent to which these methodological issues can best be appropriately resolved. In so doing, the article considers lessons from existing practice in the field including social impact assessments of trade agreements and the limited number of HRIAs so far conducted, which are specifically focused on international trade law issues. As a result of this analysis some conclusions are drawn about the value and limitations of HRIAs of trade agreements, and the extent to which we can expect them to enhance the debate about human rights law and trade law inter-linkages in the future.

Human rights impact assessment (HRIA) has increasingly gained traction among state, business and civil society actors since the endorsement of the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights by the Human Rights Council in 2011. This timely and insightful Handbook addresses HRIA in the context of business and human rights.

This article explores the development of methodologies for human rights and right to health-specific impact assessment (RTHIA) of trade-related intellectual property rights. These methodologies seek to respond to the restrictive impact of international and bilateral trade rules on domestic and global policy options to ensure access to affordable medicines in low and middle-income countries. RTHIA methodologies are emerging from human rights impact assessments, themselves an offshoot from the broader field of social and health impact assessment. A right to health specific impact assessment allows policy makers to prospectively predict the impact of intellectual property rights on domestic medicines policy, and ergo on the realization of legal duties under the international human right to the highest attainable standard of health. The effective implementation of such an assessment provides an evidence base for broadening policy space in these countries towards improving access to generic and affordable patented medicines. Yet there has been little consensus to date on key questions of principle, methodology and implementation. We overview current literature and practice in this regard in order to assess the current state of the field and the prospects for wider-scale implementation. We first assess the growing international focus on the impact of trade-related intellectual property rights on access to medicines. We then explore the emergence of impact assessments in relation to health and human rights. Finally, we analyse the practical, methodological, political and theoretical challenges of RTHIA, and overview developments in practice and scholarship that suggest effective responses to these challenges.

This publication displays the menu for choice of available methods to evaluate the impact of Free Trade Agreements (FTAs). It caters mainly to policy makers from developing countries and aims to equip them with some economic knowledge and techniques that will enable them to conduct their own economic evaluation studies on existing or future FTAs, or to critically re-examine the results of impact assessment studies conducted by others, at the very least.

Examines the impact of international trade rules on the promotion and protection of human rights, and explains why human rights are an important mechanism for assessing the social justice impact of the international trading system.