Food for a wrongly accepted thought
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Human Rights Reader 116
POVERTY DOES NOT PERSIST SOLELY BECAUSE OF INCOMPETENT, CORRUPT
GOVERNMENTS INSENSITIVE TO THE FATE OF THEIR POPULATIONS!
NO, IT IS AT ONCE THE CAUSE AND THE EFFECT OF THE TOTAL OR
PARTIAL DENIAL OF HUMAN RIGHTS.
Poverty is spreading and our world puts up with it.
Ethical double standards lead us to accept the poverty manufac-
tured by our societies. To address this question is essential
for the preservation of our own humanity. As human rights activ-
ists, we must mobilize the forces that can decisively set out to
correct the state of a world plagued by poverty.
1. Standards of 'decency' are changing and this means that pov-
erty will only cease when it is recognized as a violation of hu-
man rights (HR). And this is thoroughly missing in the MDGs with
their bogus time horizon.
2. Of the five families of HR --civil, political, cultural, eco-
nomic and social rights-- (proclaimed by the Universal Declara-
tion of HR as inherent to the human person), poverty violates
the 5th; generally the 4th; often the 3rd; and sometimes the 2nd
and even the 1st family. The systematic violation of anyone of
these rights rapidly degenerates into poverty.
3. HR are not a regrettable-inconvenience-endured-by-distant-
neighbors. Poverty is undoubtedly the most acute moral question
of the new century.
By endowing the poor with rights, the abolition of poverty will
obviously not cause poverty to disappear overnight. Moreover,
after poverty is eventually abolished, the poor will still have
a right to reparation for which governments and the interna-
tional community will be jointly liable.
4. Poverty is poorly defined by the law. Poverty is about mate-
rial wellbeing, bodily wellbeing, social wellbeing, psychologi-
cal wellbeing, security, and freedom. Legal language refuses to
consider the poor directly, choosing rather to designate them in
a fragmented way: the homeless are people of no fixed abode; the
poor are the economically vulnerable; the unemployed are the job
seekers. Law makes begging an offense. The poorest and the des-
titute become objects rather than legal subjects endowed with
rights. In today's neoliberal society, the aim is to conceal the
sources of underprivilege; the aim is to prevent dealing with
poverty as a whole; the aim is to deal with the poor "as silent
as things" (R.M.Rilke).
5. The struggle against poverty demands more pressing legal ac-
tions --which, so far, have proven to be less than successful.
6. The legal discourse in HR work is essentially concerned with
deficiencies. For this reason, the laws do little more than re-
cord exclusion and offer some remedies to avoid its worsening
and preventing its spread. In the legal language, the poor are
'those who have insufficient resources or income'.
It seems that the laws treat poverty as 'always having existed'
so that laws only provide palliative measures to address it. In
other words, legal language points to a resignation of fate of
the underprivileged and poor. What it is, is that legal thinking
has fallen within the sphere of influence of economic logic and
has thus become subjected to the imperatives of capitalist glob-
alization. As a consequence, poverty is now regarded as an un-
avoidable fact. States no longer have the objective of eradicat-
ing it, but eventually of dealing with the most visible situa-
tions which flow from it.
7. The reluctance to take into consideration the differences in
wealth, income and resources between individuals ignores the
concept of social classes.
Poverty, set in the neoliberal reading, makes it seem no longer
being a problem to be solved, but rather an accepted fact. This
is, of course, totally opposed to the HR paradigm. In capitalist
globalization, the requirements of HR are also forgotten; con-
sumers matter foremost. The right to subsistence is, for exam-
ple, interpreted minimally (having barely enough to subsist, e.
g, the $2/day the MDGs aim for, is not enough to live under de-
cent conditions). Further, the logic of profit-making generates
the rise of unemployment and under-employment, exclusion, impov-
erishment and social stress. [For M. Gandhi, commerce without
morality was one of the seven social sins].
Whereas formerly the poor were those who did not have a job,
nowadays even those who have employment at low wages are to be
regarded as poor.
8. Therefore, the realization of all HR for everyone is urgent,
EVEN if the means recommended to reach that goal go against the
neoliberal dynamics... and (constructively) against the MDGs.
Right-less people must reach the point from where to effectively
claim their right to non-poverty, i.e., the-right-not-to-be-
poor.
9. To recall, poverty is a violation of HR and hinders the sat-
isfaction of other HR. Poverty maintains the poor in a state of
dependency and increases their resignation to their fate.
10. Because of the sanctity conferred on property has an influ-
ence on the fight against poverty, the purpose of our struggle
for equal rights is to combat undue privilege and arbitrary hi-
erarchies. The moral and political right of ownership of those
that are already affluent is not of the same nature as that of
those that do not have sufficient for a decent living.
Claudio Schuftan
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
mailto:claudio@hcmc.netnam.vn
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Mostly adapted from International Social Science Journal,
No.180, UNESCO, 2004: P. Sane, Poverty, the next frontier in the
struggle for HR; G. Koubi, Poverty as a HR violation.