HRC 57 SRI statement to the Interactive dialogue with the Expert Mechanism on the right to development

57th session of the Human Rights Council

Item 3: Interactive dialogue with the Expert Mechanism on the right to development

Statement by Action Canada for Population and Development

17 September 2024

Thank you, President!

Action Canada makes this statement on behalf of the Sexual Rights Initiative. 

We welcome the Expert Mechanism’s thematic study on Individual and collective dimensions of the right to development, its emphasis of both dimensions, including the right to self-determination, and its recognition that unilateral coercive measures, occupation, and predatory loan conditionalities violate the right to development of entire peoples.

The study is crucial in a context of willful denial by many Global North states of the right to development, its collective dimensions, and its aim of ending economic colonialism and dependency - the same states that directly benefit from our unequal international economic order. 

Almost 50 years after the recognition of the right to development by the UN Commission on Human Rights in 1977, we urge States to implement the Declaration on the Right to Development and other relevant instruments, especially relating to the creation of (a) a new global economic system that is just, equitable and based on sovereign equality, (b) accountability mechanisms for multinational corporations through appropriate regulation in both the home States and host States of corporations and (c) favourable national and international conditions for the realisation of the right to development.

In conclusion, we ask the Expert Mechanism what it sees as the obligations of non-State actors (such as multinational corporations) as the study recognises their actions can have a significant impact on the right to development in a global economy where multinational corporations wield a lot of power.

Thank you.