This Chapter provides an illustration of the trends and dynamics discussed in the previous chapters through a comprehensive and contextualised examination of the specific, but paradigmatic, Greek debt crisis, arguing that, in this case as well, both the responses devised by national and supranational institutions, and their scrutiny by some human rights monitoring bodies in particular, seem to reflect an increasingly neoliberalised conception of human rights and of the debt-ESR relationship

This Chapter provides a general definition of sovereign debt, and illustrates the trend, dating back to the 1970s, of rising global public indebtedness, including in advanced economies, to reflect on the actual role of debt in the current global economic system. It then analyses the main elements of the post-crisis reform of the legal framework for economic and fiscal policy making in the European Economic and Monetary Union (a reform linked, inter alia, to the intensified need to subject the fiscal conduct of increasingly indebted states to stricter controls), and discusses how these seem to evidence the increased neoliberalisation of EU economic governance.

This Chapter critically reviews the existing international law on economic ad social rights, namely the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), and it outlines existing standards on sovereign debt and human rights. Considering the surviving peculiarities of the ICESCR (due, inter alia, to the historical contingencies that influenced its elaboration in the 1950s-60s) and the nature of the economic and fiscal policy measures that have been generally recommended over the years by its monitoring body, the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR), this Chapter challenges the purported economic neutrality of the Covenant (and, more generally, of the international ESR regime) as currently interpreted. Furthermore, it highlights the increased influence of neoliberalism on this legal framework’s post-crisis developments, especially the more recent (re)interpretation by the CESCR of the prohibition of retrogressive measures.

This Chapter introduces the book’s premises and general approach to the discussion of the soverign debt-human rights relatioship, together with the book’s outline. It also discusses and defines legal human rights, economic and social rights as international human rights, an the concepts of neoliberalism, neoliberal epistemolgy and law’s neoliberalisation for the purposes of the analysis that follows in Chapters 2-5.

This Chapter reviews and summarises the findings of the previous chapters, and it offers some concluding remarks on the shortcomings and future prospects of an increasingly neoliberalised international law.