Executive summary Over the past decade, the relationship between economic policies and human rights has attracted increased attention from scholars and lawyers, as well as by the UN Special Procedures and treaty bodies. For many years, the human rights community has expressed concerns about the negative impact on human rights of economic policies; however, the 2007 to 2008 global economic and financial crisis, and greater social scrutiny of the current historic levels of inequality within and between countries, increased attention on the topic. These issues prompted some human rights advocates and monitoring bodies to strengthen their focus on issues only scarcely addressed before, such as the mobilisation of resources for compliance with human rights obligations, the negative impact of economic policies, such as austerity measures, on the enjoyment of human rights, the insufficiently regulated financial flows and tax evasion, and the extraterritorial impact of some taxation policies. Today, the work of various human rights monitoring bodies has articulated the essential elements of states’ obligation to mobilise resources for the realisation of human rights. The purpose of this publication is to ascertain, based on a detailed examination of UN treaty bodies and special procedures’ views on the topic, the current interpretation of the scope and content of this obligation. As shown by this study, the obligation to mobilise resources is now clearly viewed as a standalone human rights obligation. States must ensure that an adequate amount of resources are mobilised for human rights realisation in a way that is consistent with human rights principles. Yet, while some aspects of the obligation to mobilise resources emerge as clear-cut, others require further consideration and clarification. The aspects that are still unclear could usefully be considered by human rights monitoring bodies in order to add weight, as well as practical and legal applicability, to the obligation to mobilise resources. The focus on resource mobilisation for compliance with human rights is particularly timely, given the renewed emphasis on this question by the international community, as reaffirmed in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (the ‘2030 Agenda’), adopted in September 2015 by 193 countries. With its 17 SDGs, the 2030 Agenda covers a comprehensive set of issues across the three dimensions of sustainable development: economic, social and environmental. The 2030 Agenda is explicitly anchored in human rights norms and principles and recognises that a rights-based approach should underpin all poverty reduction efforts (2030 Agenda, paragraphs 18–20). SDG 17, on means of implementation and global partnership, calls on all stakeholders to ‘strengthen domestic resource mobilization, including through international support to developing countries, to improve domestic capacity for tax and other revenue collection’ (SDG 17.1). It also calls on developed countries to implement fully their official development assistance commitments (SDG 17.2) and mobilise additional financial resources for developing countries from multiple sources (SDG 17.3). In the same vein, SDG 16, on peace and justice, calls on all stakeholders to ‘significantly reduce illicit financial flows’ by 2030 (SDG 16.4) and ‘substantially reduce corruption and bribery in all their forms’ (SDG 16.5). This is to be done through adherence to the rule of December 2017   The Obligation to Mobilise Resources: Bridging Human Rights, Sustainable Development Goals, and Economic and Fiscal Policies 9