Human Rights in Action: Possibilities and Difficulties for Penetrating in the Financial World

Abstract

Vulture funds attack indebted States, when their most vulnerable populations suffer in first-hand the effects of the crisis. The actions of such funds against Argentina, served as the context for the Human Rights Council (HR) fully involving in key financial debates; debates that until then were quasi-monopolized by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The article analyzes the Council diagnosis and its solutions proposed to the vulture funds problem in the 2014-2015 period, in order to empirically show the potentialities and difficulties of the Human Rights approach for penetrating in the financial field. For these purposes, the paper exhibits the conditions that made possible the actions of the Council in the specific case and, in turn, the reactions that such actions aroused by part of the dominant agents of the financial field. It is argued that the effectiveness of the “veto power” of these dominant agents to the Human Rights alternative initiatives largely rests on the high degree of concentration of the sovereign debt market in which these funds operate.