A/HRC/17/37 United Nations General Assembly Distr.: General 11 April 2011 Original: English Human Rights Council Seventeenth session Agenda item 3 Promotion and protection of all human rights, civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights, including the right to development Report of the Independent Expert on the effects of foreign debt and other related international financial obligations of States on the full enjoyment of all human rights, particularly economic, social and cultural rights, Cephas Lumina* Summary Between June 2010 and February 2011, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights convened three regional multi-stakeholder consultations – in Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia and the Pacific – on the draft general guidelines on foreign debt and human rights (“the guidelines”) to assist the Independent Expert in further elaborating the guidelines. The main goal of the consultations was to generate ideas, based on regional experiences and perspectives, on the form and content of the draft guidelines in order to improve them. The consultations addressed the following issues: (a) the key human rights and international legal principles that should underpin the guidelines; (b) the impact of economic reform policies and debt relief operations on the capacity of States to design and implement national development policies and programmes and to fulfil their human rights obligations; (c) the elements or principles that sovereign loan agreements should contain to ensure that these agreements do not contribute to the violation of human rights or constrain the fulfilment of human rights by borrower States; (d) elements of a new, enhanced debt sustainability framework (based on the principle of shared responsibility of creditors and debtors for preventing and resolving unsustainable debt situations as underscored in the Monterrey Consensus of the International Conference on Financing for Development) which includes an assessment of the impact of debt burdens on the realization of human rights and the achievement of national development objectives; (e) the need for human rights impact assessments before and after loan contraction; (f) measures to safeguard gains from debt relief; (g) mechanisms for public audits of debt and lending portfolios; (h) the * Late submission. GE.11-12615