A/HRC/37/54 quintiles, regional areas — receive what benefit from State services; the impact of projected cuts on poverty rates, consumption and income, among others; and potential adaptive strategies.46 Those tools provide important quantitative analyses to support a human rights impact assessment. They can also provide equally warranted assessments of burden-sharing and fairness in relation to benefits. However, since not all human rights impacts can be measured adequately by quantitative indicators, such as income, unemployment or poverty rates, such quantitative analyses should be complemented by a qualitative analysis based on the normative content of human rights. 49. A human rights impact assessment can very usefully incorporate or be accompanied by a budget analysis. This may include rights-based budget audits. A number of organizations have carried out more systematic analyses of budgets and benefit packages from a human rights point of view. However, most governments do not appear to have developed principles or tools that are specifically focused on the human rights implications of fiscal consolidation measures. 50. A far wider range of organizations have prepared or commissioned one-off reports analysing the impact of financial crises. For example, the former President of the Hellenic Parliament established the Truth Committee on Public Debt to analyse the human rights impact of the Greek debt crisis, and the Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs Committee of the European Parliament commissioned an extensive comparative analysis of the impact of financial crises on the fundamental rights of individuals in several European Union member States.47 Human rights agencies,48 international organizations49 and United Nations human rights bodies 50 have also carried out such analyses. Their reports significantly enrich the understanding of the types of impacts on human rights and how those impacts are transmitted to the population to support future human rights impact assessments. None, however, was specifically designed as a tool that could be replicated and applied to future situations. Indeed, insofar as standard tools do exist or have been used — such as in the case of the European Commission’s social impact analyses of the third adjustment programme of Greece — they are not based on human rights standards.51 B. Particular challenges in developing and applying a human rights impact assessment to potentially impermissible retrogressive measures 51. What was lacking until the 2007–2008 financial crisis was an analysis of the multiple ways in which fiscal consolidation measures could impact human rights. Policymakers need more detailed guidance that could help to combine that knowledge with analytical approaches that would allow human rights impact assessments to be carried out in a timely and solid manner and improve policy responses to financial crises by ensuring that they prevent, minimize and mitigate adverse human rights impacts. Combining rigour and comprehensiveness with usability will be a particular challenge in developing a human rights impact assessment approach. 52. Ensuring participation is essential for human rights impact assessments. A key challenge is how to identify, reach and understand the depth and breadth of impacts on 46 47 48 49 50 51 14 See http://wbi.worldbank.org/boost/tools-resources/topics/sector-analysis/benefit-incidence-analysis. See Aleksandra Ivanoković Tamamović, “The impact of the crisis on fundamental rights across member States of the EU: comparative analysis”, European Parliament Think Tank (2015), available at www.europarl.europa.eu/thinktank/en/document.html?reference=IPOL_STU(2015)510021. Notably, the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights has published numerous reports on different fundamental rights dimensions of the crisis. See, for example, “The European Union as a Community of values: safeguarding fundamental rights in times of crisis” (2013), available at http://fra.europa.eu/en/publication/2013/european-union-community-values-safeguardingfundamental-rights-times-crisis. Council of Europe, “Safeguarding human rights in times of economic crisis,” Issue paper, Commissioner for Human Rights (2013). See, for example, A/HRC/34/57/Add.1; and A/HRC/31/60/Add.2. See, for example, European Commission “Assessment of the social impact of the new Stability Support Programme for Greece” (SWD(2015)162/F1) (2015).