Together with the Special Rapporteur on the right to development Surya Deva, the Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights convened a roundtable discussion on 11 December at the Palais des Nations in Geneva, focused on the role of human rights in the 4th International Conference on Financing for Development (FfD4), to be held in Seville (Spain) between 30 June and 3 July 2025. The event was exceptionally well attended: 28 States sent delegates, and they were joined by a number of UN agencies and NGOs.
The Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights opened the event by welcoming the “Elements Paper” released in November 2024, which outlines certain priorities for the conference, while at the same time expressing his concern that the need to invest in social protection was underemphasized in the document. He expressed his support for the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and the Global Partnership for Universal Social Protection to Achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (USP2030) global call for action, proposing a target of an annual 2 percentage point increase for social protection coverage (SDG 1.3).
The Special Rapporteur used the opportunity to list a number of innovative financing mechanisms that could be used to complement official development assistance (ODA) in order to support low-income countries’ efforts to invest in social protection floors. Such mechanisms include “debt for social protection” swaps; the issuance of IMF Special Drawing Rights on the basis of need rather than based on the IMF quotas of the respective countries; solidarity levies, including a financial transaction tax, a levy on airplane tickets, on maritime transport or on fossil fuel extraction; or a tax on billionaires, as proposed by Brazil when it chaired the G20. He provided rough estimates of the revenue that each of these tools could raise, showing that the funding shortfall for social protection floors in low-income countries (estimated at US $308 billion per year, representing 52% of their GDP) could be met, provided the political will is there. The Global Fund for Social Protection, which the Special Rapporteur proposed in a 2021 report to the Human Rights Council, could facilitate the mobilization of funds in support of countries’ efforts to establish social protection floors.
A more detailed brief will be prepared shortly, as a contribution to the FfD4 conference.