(Bio)Fueling Injustice? - Europafrica

public. The assessment must also be undertaken to inform the
measures that States must adopt to prevent violations or
ensure their cessation as well as to ensure effective remedies.
Human rights impact assessment (HRIA) for States has been a topic of growing
importance, and it is now considered to be a key tool to comply with human rights
obligations. The rationale behind it is that a State or an institution cannot claim that
one of its policies will not violate human rights if it did not make all reasonable
efforts to assess its likely impact on human rights. There is still little guidance on
what policy human rights impact assessment exactly entails. 495 Lessons can be drawn
from the draft Guiding Principles on Human Rights Impact Assessments of Trade and
Investment Agreements 496 which is currently being developed by the UN Special
Rapporteur on the right to food and which has principles which can be applied to
general policy impact assessment, and from the FAO Guide to Conducting a Right to
Food Assessment. 497
Human rights impact assessments are different from social or sustainability impact
assessments. They are based on different norms (human rights), and they seek to
assess whether policies follow the human rights principles: Participation,
Accountability, Non-discrimination, Transparency, Human dignity, Empowerment, Rule
of law (also known as the PANTHER framework). They are based not only on a
conceptual analysis, but also on a sociological examination of the impacts, both
intended and unintended. 498
The European Commission has made much progress in the recent years in assessing
the impact of its policies on human rights, 499 and it is still reflecting on how to improve
it. The Commission aims at making the Union exemplary by checking proposals’
impact on fundamental rights through preparatory consultations, impact assessments
(IA), and compatibility checks of initiatives with the Charter on Fundamental Rights. 500
Since 2009, impact assessments should include an assessment of fundamental rights,
which has been specified in two staff working papers. 501 The European Parliament also
intends to check for the compatibility of the legislative acts it works on with the Charter
on Fundamental Rights. 502 However, it should be noted that compatibility check are
different from and cannot replace HRIAs. 503 HRIAs are more empirical and
participatory, and they allow considering different policy options. 504
Despite this positive policy framework, a study by Concord of 164 impact
assessments, including 77 which are relevant for developing countries, found that only
7 IAs were looking at the impact on developing countries. And none of them tries to
assess how developing countries are affected; they only take note of an impact. 505
The EU biofuel policy has followed this pattern. Various impact assessments have
been conducted at the different stages of the policy making process since 2006. 506
Though it must be admitted that these IAs were conducted prior to the reform of the
system to better include fundamental rights in 2009, there are still largely
inadequate from a human rights perspective. Revealing fact, none of the public
documents mentions the term “rights”. The IAs essentially assess the economic
interest for the Union, in terms of cost, competitiveness, effect on trade, job creation in
the EU, etc. Social impacts are overlooked, impacts on developing countries are rarely
invoked, and the assessment is over optimistic without any justification. 507
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