Ayako Yokuba

Rights Before Rates: The Human Rights Case for Reconnecting SDG Financing to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights at 75

As the international community commemorates the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in December 2023 and convenes the SDG Summit in September of the same year, this paper argues that the growing gulf between sovereign debt obligations and the capacity of states to fulfil economic and social rights represents not merely a fiscal challenge but one that may give rise to conditions inconsistent with the effective enjoyment of economic and social rights under international human rights law. Drawing on the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights' emerging framework of a *human rights economy*, the ICESCR obligation to deploy maximum available resources for rights realisation, and recent data documenting that 3.3 billion people live in countries spending more on debt interest payments than on health or education, this paper argues, on the basis of the evidence and legal-policy analysis examined, that important features of the prevailing architecture of development finance are insufficiently aligned with the rights commitments that states have reaffirmed in both the UDHR and the 2030 Agenda. It assesses the SDG Stimulus proposal, critiques the absence of rights-based accountability in debt sustainability frameworks, and proposes a three-pillar rights-aligned financing architecture comprising human rights impact assessments for debt restructuring, reformed debt sustainability analysis, and enhanced civil society participation in fiscal decision-making. The paper is published as part of the AUN Voice & Rights Working Paper Series ahead of the SDG Summit, to which it is intended to contribute an explicitly rights-based framing of the financing discourse.