A/HRC/38/33 9. The Special Rapporteur is grateful to IMF for its willingness to organize meetings with key actors, including member of its Executive Board, a Deputy Managing Director and senior staff of the Research Department, Strategy, Policy and Review Department, Fiscal Affairs Department, Legal Department, Communications Department, all five Area Departments, and the Independent Evaluation Office. With the exception of the Legal Department, which provided virtually no information, he is very satisfied with the cooperation of IMF. 10. Regrettably, the World Bank, despite repeated requests, refused to facilitate any meetings between the Special Rapporteur and World Bank social protection experts. It must be assumed that this was in retaliation for his 2015 report to the General Assembly, in which he concluded that the World Bank was, for most purposes, a “human rights-free zone”.15 It is nonetheless gratifying to see that the World Bank has now begun to change its approach in this regard in some areas.16 11. The Special Rapporteur is also grateful to civil society organizations, academic experts, other international officials and many others who provided inputs for the present report. He has also benefited greatly from the detailed IMF reports on social protection and published by its Independent Evaluation Office and by the International Organizations Clinic at New York University School of Law.17 II. Legal framework and IMF mandate 12. The Articles of Agreement of IMF confer on it the powers of oversight and to provide financial assistance and advice. Its stated purposes include contributing to “the development of the productive resources of all members as primary objectives of economic policy” and providing resources to countries with balance-of-payment issues so that they do not resort to “measures destructive of national or international prosperity”. The Articles also require IMF to “respect the domestic social and political policies of members” in its surveillance and lending. 18 After reviewing these and related provisions, the General Counsel of IMF, François Gianviti, concluded that IMF was “a monetary agency, not a development agency”, and that its task was thus “to maintain orderly exchange rates and a multilateral system of payments free of restrictions on current payments”.19 13. In stark contrast to such formalism, a review of the mandate of IMF performed in 2010 after the financial crisis, acknowledged that the purposes in the Articles “speak to the issues of a bygone era”, while the powers conferred “do not even reference today’s most compelling issues”. Where Mr. Gianviti had concluded that, if IMF wished to integrate human rights considerations in its decisions, the Articles should be amended, the 2010 review acknowledged the difficulty of the amendment process and concluded instead that “the Articles are sufficiently flexible to accommodate major reforms”.20 14. A companion analysis, prepared by the Legal Department, starts with the formal position that the powers of IMF “are generally limited to those explicitly identified in the Articles”, but then observes that it is authorized “to adopt decisions of general applicability (‘policies’) to provide more specific content” to its powers. Provided that they are consistent with the text of the Articles, those policies may adjust over time to take into consideration changing circumstances. But having set the scene for a degree of policy flexibility, the Legal Department then notes that, “since all of the enumerated purposes are 15 16 17 18 19 20 See A/70/274, para. 68. Compare the heavy reliance on the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women in World Bank, Women, Business and the Law 2018 (Washington, D.C., 2018), with the determined non-engagement with the Convention in the same report in 2016. IMF, The IMF and Social Protection (Washington, D.C., 2018). Available at www.ieoimf.org/ieo/files/completedevaluations/SP%20-%202017EvalReport.pdf. See article IV, section 3 (b); and the Guidelines on Conditionality (Decision No. 6056-(79/38)). F. Gianviti, “Economic, Social, and Cultural Human Rights and the International Monetary Fund” in P. Alston (ed.), Non-State Actors and Human Rights (2005) p. 135. See www.imf.org/external/np/pp/eng/2010/012210a.pdf. 5