City’s Dr Mihir Kanade to head UN panel on right to development

Even as the Orange City is celebrating the elevation of one of its own to the post of Chief Justice of India, there is more cause to bask in the glory of another Nagpurian. Dr Mihir Kanade has been appointed by the United Nations (UN) as the Chair of the drafting group of international experts to prepare a new landmark international treaty on the right to development. Dr Kanade is the Academic Director of the United Nations University for Peace, headquartered in Costa Rica, and the Head of its Department of International Law. It may be mentioned that Dr Kanade is an alumnus of Somalwar School, Nikalas Branch and RTMNU’s Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar College of Law. Explaining the purview of his new role, Dr Kanade said that the right to development was essentially about the right to an enabling national as well as international environment conducive to the realisation of development for all.

This, therefore, entails not just evaluating national development policies from the perspective of the right to development of citizens, but equally, the policies adopted by States individually and collectively which might have an adverse impact on the right to development of others. These policies with an international dimension include, among other things, conditionalities on loans and development aid by international financial institutions or by countries bilaterally as well as terms of trade and investment agreements.

As Chair, Dr Kanade will now finalise the draft treaty as adopted by the expert group and the accompanying commentaries prepared by him by the end of November 2019 for formal submission. These documents will be presented to the Open-ended Inter-governmental Working Group on the right to development of the UN Human Rights Council at its up-coming meeting in April 2020 in Geneva.