12
The World Bank Legal Review
However, “not all such provisions translate into a reliance on human rights in a direct operational sense.” McInerney-Lankford points to regional systems, particularly those in Europe, that intertwine human rights and development more extensively. For example, the European Union formally incorporates human rights principles in its economic partnerships with nonEuropean countries. Such integration, McInerney-Lankford believes, should be more broadly adopted. In this way, she calls for regime interaction as both an innovation and an empowerment strategy. Ideally, international law will eventually consist of “human rights as a shared legal framework, highlighting both partner and donor obligations under international human rights law and offering concrete operational entry points for their application in development activities.” In “Beyond the Orthodoxy of Rule of Law and Justice Sector Reform: A Framework for Legal Empowerment and Innovation through the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities,” Janet E. Lord, Deepti Samant Raja, and Peter Blanck show how this convention—one of the newer additions to the United Nations’ “core” human rights treaties—innovates by establishing extensive guidelines for domestic implementation of the treaty’s principles. In “Transforming through Transparency: Opening Up the World Bank’s Sanctions Regime,” Conrad C. Daly and Frank A. Fariello, Jr., describe the Bank’s sanctions regime, which was established in 1996 to combat corruption and fraud in the disbursement of funds. The regime forms part of a greater effort by the Bank to increase accountability and transparency in its operations, and stands alongside better-known innovations of the Bank such as its Inspection Panel, which examines compliance with Bank protocols more broadly. Such reforms represent commendable efforts to bring good governance policy home; that is, to prioritize good governance principles not only in borrower countries but also in the Bank’s own institutional practices. One question that emerges in considering these reforms is why the Inspection Panel and the sanctions regime are separate institutions. It seems debatable whether the reasons for such separation extend beyond mere historical contingency. As these kinds of internal reforms develop, perhaps the Bank will integrate and consolidate its various monitoring functions. In “Intellectual Property: Facilitating Technology Transfer for Development,” Roy F. Waldron discusses the innovative arrangements that pharmaceutical companies are entering into with public sector actors in order to increase access to medicines, framed by the author as the transfer and application of medical technology to national public health. Such innovations are directly linked to empowerment in that they may allow developing countries to increase levels of public health in vulnerable populations and in society more generally. Although many of the specific details of these agreements are not discussed for reasons of confidentiality, they