Human Rights and Extreme Poverty

Abstract

This paper provides a rationale for defining extreme poverty as a combination of income poverty, human development poverty and social exclusion. It briefly discusses the implication of treating this combination as union or intersection of the three sets of people, suffering from these three types of poverty. It also brings out the significance of looking at extreme poverty in a human rights perspective, and what is its value addition to programmes of poverty eradication in different countries. Besides, it elaborates on the formulation of such programmes, in terms of human rights obligation through national actions, extending them to programmes of international actions. By spelling out the characteristics of these actions that make them conform to a human rights approach, it discusses some of the anti-poverty programmes that have been used in different countries like the United States, European Union, Africa and Asia and how they differ from a rights-based approach that has been developed in this paper. Since 1989, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights has been discussing extreme poverty as a major source of deprivation, affecting all human rights, which constitute a violation of human dignity and has therefore called for urgent national and international action to eliminate them. In 1998, the commission decided to establish the mandate of the independent expert on the question of human rights and extreme poverty. A M Lizin served as the independent expert from 1998 to 2004, and I succeeded her in 2004. In its resolutions 1998/25, 2004/23 and 2005/16, the commission invited the independent expert to focus on the relationship between the enjoyment of h uman rights and extreme poverty; the obstacles encountered and progress made by women living in extreme poverty; and the impact of discrimination on extreme poverty. This paper builds upon the four reports on the subject submitted to the Human Rights Commission in 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008 as well as on my mission report on extreme poverty conditions in the United States (US), considered by the commission in 2006. Besides, findings from my experiences in some of the A frican, Asian and European Union (EU) countries reflect how looking at extreme poverty from the perspective of human rights makes a distinct value addition to the discourse on poverty and its eradication.