Privatizing Human Rights: Destroying the Social Contract and Empowering Corporate Actors

Governments around the world are privatizing everything, with dramatic but largely ignored negative consequences for human rights. This open access book outlines the response that is urgently needed.

Corporations are being given control over water, healthcare, housing, public transportation, child welfare services, aged care, and much else. Privatization is promoted by international financial institutions, consulting firms, and development actors as the answer to public finances devastated by the very tax cuts insistently pushed by these groups. Their pitch is based upon a mythology that extols the virtues of an idealized market while ignoring the heavy human rights costs incurred.

Building on the latest evidence and on specially commissioned case studies, this book shows how the touted 'efficiency' of the private sector is often predicated on higher charges and/or reduced services, destructive employment practices, and the highly predictable exclusion of many users. Privatization generally costs states more money, marginalizes democratic decision-making, and transforms citizens from rights-holders into customers while sidelining accountability.

The authors develop an approach designed to enable human rights actors, including courts, UN treaty monitoring bodies, and NGOs to move beyond their longstanding agnosticism towards privatization. It starts with a presumption that privatization is inherently retrogressive in human rights terms. Whatever mix of public and private is reflected in any given arrangement, governments must retain the degree of control necessary to ensure respect for rights, and the legal, financial and administrative ability to do so. The book charts a new direction for responding to the ever-growing threat that privatization poses to human rights.