Sovereign Debt and Socio-economic Rights Beyond the Crisis

Today, when the relationship between sovereign debt and economic and social rights (ESR)1 is mentioned, austerity2 inevitably comes to mind. At least in Europe, austerity materialised, in the aftermath of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, as a consequence of the Eurozone debt crisis, negatively affecting the realisation of many of the rights enshrined in core international human rights instruments, such as the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) and the European Social Charter, and producing what, in hindsight, clearly appears as a permanent restructuring of the welfare systems of several European countries. The attention of human rights scholars, monitoring bodies and civil society has, therefore, largely refocused on the human rights impacts of austerity and economic reform policies3 (and, more recently, on the strains put by the coronavirus disease COVID-19 pandemic on state resources, and the impact of pre-existing debt on the emergency response efforts of severalcountries),4 after that, in recent decades, it had been mainly directed to issues of debt restructuring,5 debt relief,6 and odious debt--