Over the last two decades, many commentaries have been released on the way the WBG and IMF have taken human rights obligations on board, or refrained from doing so. This publication could have set the strict legal obligations and corresponding responsibilities for both IFIs higher, for instance, by presenting more extensive interpretations of already existing case law or by extrapolating trends in the human rights field more progressively than I have done. However, I believe that to do so would have overstretched the legal validity and applicability of developments in the field of international human rights law to IFIs such as the WBG and IMF. Overall, there is a lot of pressure on both organisations, as well as on other multilateral development banks not discussed here, to accept more accountability under international human rights standards. It has been made clear by what standards they are already bound, given the status of international human rights law in 2014, while, as to the extent to which both IFIs, be it to different degrees, still argue that they are not bound by such standards, it has been shown that the space for such a position is becoming more and more limited.

It helps to underscore that both IFI are independently moving in a direction in which the relevance of human rights to the fulfilment of their mandates is recognised, be it in the form of small steps following other small steps. In addition, it should not be forgotten that the pronouncements on human rights by both IFIs are only partly relevant from a strictly legal perspective. However, human rights law is best understood as living law and actors such as IFIs can be best considered non-static entities, even given their sometimes static approaches to their own mandates. Both IFIs have entered the human rights doorway, be it to different degrees. And should they want to move backwards or reconsider their respective ways forward, international human rights law as it presently stands can serve as an invitation, but also as a stop sign.

Building on human rights law as ‘living law’ and seeing both the WBG and IMF as ‘non-static entities’, it makes sense to put the findings of this publication in a somewhat historical perspective.