Much has been written on the human rights relevance and impacts of the policies and activities of the World Bank and IMF --or International Financial Institutions (IFIs). However while many of the human rights-based critiques of the Bank and Fund purport to link broadly defined reforms with obligations under international human rights law,rarely has this been carried out through a rigorous and in-depth application of international legal rules governing the proper interpretation of the institutions' mandates, and rarely have the policy consequences and practical possibilities for human rights integration been explored in any detail. These are the principal gaps that the present book aims to fill, by reference to a sample of the IFIs' most important and controversial contemporary activities.
