A/HRC/50/60 pharmaceutical companies, claiming patent rights, and have weaponized vaccines as a diplomatic means to assert influence. 16 Despite the proposal to waive the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property for COVID-19 health-care technologies, considerations of cross-licensing have been dictated by funding conditions that bypass the benefits of vaccine distribution.17 Resistance from high-income countries suggests that health inequities are not merely a result of weak international cooperation but a deliberate strategy to cement nationalist and capitalist interests at the expense of justice and equality.18 12. Racialized health inequities were also evidenced through vaccination rates and healthcare spending. The financial burden of reaching the target vaccination rate of 70 per cent was as much as 71 times higher for low-income countries compared to high-income countries.19 The uneven multilateral playing field has thus generated a “two-track pandemic”,20 in which “underdeveloped” countries are “plunged into multiple interlinked emergencies – a debt crisis, a development crisis and a human rights crisis”.21 13. While recognizing the progress made in the adoption of the 2030 Agenda, the Special Rapporteur considers that it is incapable of fundamentally disrupting the dynamic of racially discriminatory underdevelopment embedded in the international economic order. The development framework, including the 2030 Agenda, preserves colonial injustice, perpetuates the domination of powerful nations over peoples and territories that were subject to historical colonial extraction and preserves structural racial discrimination within nations. Member States must make it a global priority to transform the international economic system in order to promote racial justice and truly “leave no one behind”. 14. In the writing of the present report, the Special Rapporteur benefited from valuable input from two expert group meetings; responses to a questionnaire sent to multilateral development institutions; interviews with representatives of United Nations agencies; and submissions received from a range of stakeholders in response to a public call for submissions. The Special Rapporteur would like to thank all stakeholders for their submissions, including the World Bank Group and Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) for responding to her questionnaire. She would also like to thank representatives of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) for meeting with her. Non-confidential submissions will be available on the web page of the mandate.22 15. While preparing the report, the Special Rapporteur was struck by the greater institutional reflection on racial justice, equality and non-discrimination within a number of international bodies. It is evident that the racial justice uprisings that mobilized the world community in 2020 have significantly shifted the terms of debate at the United Nations and elsewhere. The Special Rapporteur expresses support for all those who are actively challenging systemic racism within their institutions. In many contexts, racially and ethnically marginalized employees, in particular, are voluntarily taking on institutional antiracism work, providing leadership without compensation. The Special Rapporteur stresses the importance of institutional reforms, but notes that in order for anti-racism initiatives to be successful, institutional leadership must commit the necessary resources and political will to transformation, including by making their institutions more representative of the populations they serve, especially at decision-making levels. 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 A/HRC/48/58, para. 28. United Nations, Inter-agency Task Force on Financing for Development, Financing for Sustainable Development Report 2021 (United Nations, New York, 2021), p. 110. Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould, “The Western Flu: The coronavirus pandemic as a Eurocentric crisis”, Global Challenges, special issue No. 1 (2020). United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Global Dashboard for Vaccine Equity. Available at https://data.undp.org/vaccine-equity/ (accessed on 14 June 2022). Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), media briefing on COVID-19, Geneva, 7 June 2021. United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, statement to the forty-ninth session of the Human Rights Council, Geneva, 11 March 2022. See https://www.ohchr.org/en/special-procedures/sr-racism. 5