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Last month, the “Sustainable Development Goals” (SDGs) were launched at the UN in New York. This is the outcome of two years of consultations, lobbying, and debate about what the “post-2015” agenda should look like. This agenda is likely to have far-reaching implications both for development finance and for the promotion of social and economic rights. However, why adopt goals at all? Any systematic effort to answer this seemingly elementary conceptual question has been disturbingly absent. What’s more, not only has this basic question not been answered, what is most striking is that it has hardly been asked.

Iraqi al-Amal Association in collaboration with Ala Ali (Independent Researcher/Analyst and Peace Activist) conducted a focus-group based conflict analysis of the Iraqi province of Nineveh. The findings provide important insights into recent developments in Iraq, and the advancement of ISIS.

Several key issues contributing to and sustaining conflict were identified through this research, as were points of entry for peacebuilding, which can be capitalised on to reduce tensions.

There has been no shortage of highly publicized scandals involving the financial sector in recent years, from the crash in 2008 onwards. A much less known, yet equally shocking, one is the key role banks play in enabling corruption, which has a devastating impact on people around the world. This is the focus of Banks and Dirty Money, a recently published report by Global Witness. It highlights how regulatory failure lies at heart of this problem too.

Corruption is “public enemy number one” in the developing world, according to Jim Yong Kim, the President of the Word Bank. In poor countries it kills people and traps millions more in poverty. When unscrupulous officials steal vast sums of state money, they decimate funds that should be spent on vital services like health care, education and infrastructure.

In a recent report (“the report”), the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Extreme Poverty, Mr. Philip Alston (“the Rapporteur”) addressed the issue of economic inequality, drawing its connections to the enjoyment of human rights and to policy recommendations needed to tackle it. Among the recommendations offered in the report, some squarely focused on economic policies. States should “reduce inequality by adopting taxation policies that are instrumental to achieving that aim,” the report said. By linking economic inequality to human rights enjoyment and to the actions and omissions by the state (in pursuing a particular tax policy), the report constitutes yet another important building block in the emerging body of standards that connect acts and omissions of the state in the field of economic policy to human rights.