ABSTRACT
At the United Nations Summit in September 2015, the UN General Assembly adopted the resolution Transforming our world: The 2030 agenda for sustainable development. The 2030 Agenda sets out a global plan of action, including 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 169 targets, upon which the United Nations and its members will focus their funding, expertise, and efforts over the next 15 years. While the introductory paragraphs of the resolution repeatedly state that the 2030 Agenda is grounded in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and international human rights treaties, there is a striking absence of references to human rights in the goals and targets designed to implement the plan. The SDGs on food, health, education, water and sanitation, and decent work, for example, might all have been framed in terms of human rights as they correlate directly with economic and social rights recognized in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, as well as the Convention on the Rights of the Child, among other international human rights treaties. The failure to fully integrate human rights into the global development plan for 2016–2030 reinforces the separate but parallel tracks of development and human rights since the founding of the United Nations. This chapter examines the disparity between the SDGs and human rights legal and ethical obligations of United Nations members, and explores the reasons for, and implications of, this striking disjuncture in international law, policy, and planning.
