A/78/213 1. Lack of cultural rights impact assessments 51. Whereas businesses and civil society organizations 48 benefiting from development aid might be asked to conduct human rights and environmental impact assessments of their projects to justify their funding, the same due diligence requirement does not exist for international organizations. Intern ational development and trade organizations seldom have human rights impact assessments, let alone cultural rights impact assessments. 52. Currently, conditionalities placed on IMF loans do not include any sort of human rights impact assessments prior to financing. The potential impact the loan may have on cultural rights is not contemplated prior to lending, even though the organization yields an incredible amount of leverage in what types of policy decisions States must take in order to receive financial assistance. 49 Still, in the IMF Guidelines on Conditionality, it is explicitly stated that “if feasible and appropriate, any adverse effects of program measures on the most vulnerable should be mitigated”. 50 53. The World Bank has provided information that demonstrates a shift to requiring impact assessment elements that include cultural rights, but this has happened very recently and does not yet apply to many existing projects. In addition, the urgency of starting projects and collaboration with private bodies are significant barriers to a thorough impact assessment of the projects on cultural rights. 2. A piecemeal cultural rights framework 54. Another consequence of the absence of direct references to cultural rights in development agendas is that the relevant framework for their implementation cannot be integrated into all the relevant phases. Accordingly, what we witness is a piecemeal approach, where cultural rights are referred to after the project is completed, or in some specific initiatives, but not as a general approach guiding the elaboration, implementation and evaluation of actions or policies. 55. One can see this in the piecemeal approach of WIPO or even UNESCO to cultural rights in development. A further example is the market-based model of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, initiative MADE51, which supports the capacities of refugees to develop and maintain their artisanal skills and crafts, create cooperation and integrate a meaningful value chain. 51 This initiative managed to leverage the exercising of refugees’ cultural rights, their knowledge, know-how and heritage, to contribute to the kind of development that they could see themselves in and could fully contribute to. It does not, however, form pa rt of a systematic policy of the Office relating to project elaboration and support, and therefore may not be sustainable. __________________ 48 49 50 51 23-14310 Contributions of Cultural Relief Initiatives, Curating Tomorrow and Comisión Nacional Derechos Humanos de México. Juan Pablo Bohoslavsky, “Complicity of International Financial Institutions in violation of human rights in the context of economic reforms”, Columbia Human Rights Law Review, vol. 52, 2020, p. 203. See IMF, Revised Operational Guidance to IMF Staff on the 2002 Conditionality Guidelines (2014). See www.made51.org. 15/24