A/HRC/37/54 66. What should be covered: The human rights impact assessment should include: (a) review of all the policy options for tackling a crisis, including countercyclical measures; (b) analysis of how policy changes and proposed budget cuts and other adjustment measures are likely to affect the population, in particular the most vulnerable groups — using a variety of quantitative and qualitative tools; (c) analysis of the extent to which budget, policy, legislative and other changes may contribute to fulfilling the State’s human rights obligations or potentially undermine them; and (d) a (non-exhaustive) list of preventive or mitigating measures to take to respond to the analysis that are in line with the government’s human rights obligations. 67. Who should conduct the human rights impact assessment: Who carries out the process will have important implications for the uptake of the results, the expertise brought to bear, potential conflicts of interest, the depth of the consultations carried out, the degree to which recommendations are challenged and justified, or whether the process simply becomes a validation of decisions already taken. 55 There is no one optimal solution for conducting human rights impact assessments. Whether it is the government ministry or ministries responsible for the reform, international financial institutions, bodies with human rights expertise, such as a national human rights institution or a civil society organization, all have trade-offs. The guiding principles would build on the criteria developed in the Guiding principles for human rights impact assessments of trade and investment agreements, 56 which set out specific criteria for the conduct of human rights impact assessments, such as the independence of the body carrying out the assessment; appropriate expertise and funding; and the status accorded to the assessment so that the results are actually considered in the final decision-making processes.57 68. How data and information should be collected: The norms that underpin human rights duties must be translated into more concrete, objective and measurable criteria for assessing how policy choices impact rights fulfilment. 58 The norms must then be further “translated” into tests that can guide a meaningful analysis. A human rights impact assessment to assess economic reform measures will often be complex as it involves both quantitative and qualitative analyses to understand the implications of particular budget cuts and changes in taxation and social security entitlements. On the quantitative analysis side, there are well-developed approaches to modelling distributional impacts using income quintiles. In order to ensure compliance with the human rights requirement of nondiscrimination and that due attention is paid to the situation of groups at risk of marginalization or vulnerability, it is essential that those indicators provide information disaggregated by gender, disability, age group, region, ethnicity and any other grounds considered relevant, based on a contextual, country-level appreciation of groups at risk. 69. How the human rights impact assessment should be carried out: The guiding principles for assessing human rights impacts should provide procedural guidance on how to undertake such assessment. The methodology should draw from the experience of impact assessment processes already in place. In general, it would include screening, scoping, evidence-gathering, including data collection, analysing impacts, conclusions and recommendations, including consideration of less harmful options, prevention, mitigation and management. 70. The design and implementation of the procedure should be based on the principles of transparency and inclusive participation. More specifically, active participation in addressing fiscal consolidation measures requires, as a start, access to information. Governments conducting a human rights impact assessment may have better access to information, but they must, to the greatest extent possible, make information available to the stakeholders in the human rights impact assessment process. 59 55 56 57 58 59 See Center for Economic and Social Rights, “Assessing austerity”. See A/HRC/19/59/Add.5, appendix. The criteria also include transparency and inclusive participation, which will be addressed below. See Center for Economic and Social Rights, “Assessing austerity”. The Government of the Plurinational State of Bolivia has developed a set of human rights indicators that enable the State and civil society to have official, updated and disaggregated statistical 17