POVERTY:A VIOLATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS OR NOT?

Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2264371

WHAT IS POVERTY? According to Human Rights Commissions Report1, the concept of poverty can be stated in three different ways. The first and most effective definition of poverty is that Poverty is a situation in which there is dearth of essential facilities, resulting from inadequate income. There is a socially accepted minimum level of living in every society. Those who live below this minimum level are said to live in poverty. The second definition of poverty is based on basic or fundamental needs, i.e. a failure to meet the basic human needs; or to remain deprived from such needs is a state of poverty. The basic human needs include not only food, clothing and dwelling, but also health and education. The third way of defining poverty is in respect of lack of opportunities. Shifting from the traditional base of fundamental needs & income, the modern definition of poverty is based on the lack of opportunities. According to the modern connotation, poverty does not merely mean lack of adequate income or inability to meet basic human needs. Some people do have a potential to cross the borders of poverty. They have good health and can live a productive life however still they are deprived of suitable opportunities. The tacit denial of opportunities pushes them into unemployment resulting in loss of income and finally inability to meet the basic human needs. At the UNs World Summit on Social Development, the Copenhagen Declaration described poverty as a condition characterised by severe deprivation of basic human needs, including food, safe drinking water, sanitation facilities, health, shelter, education and information.2. It depends not only on income but also on access to services. It includes a lack of income and productive resources to ensure sustainable livelihoods; hunger and malnutrition; ill health; limited or lack of access to education and other basic services; increased morbidity and mortality from illness; homelessness and inadequate housing; unsafe environments and social discrimination and exclusion. It is also characterized by lack of participation in decision making and in civil, social and cultural life. It occurs in all countries: as mass poverty in many developing countries, pockets of poverty amid wealth in developed countries, loss of livelihoods as a result of economic recession, sudden poverty as a result of disaster or conflict, the poverty of

1 2

www.humanrightsinitiative.org/.../millenium_report_review.htm, last seen at 13.2.13 http://library.thinkquest.org/05aug/00282/over_whatis.htm, last seen at 13.2.13

Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2264371

low-wage workers, and the utter destitution of people who fall outside family support systems, social institutions and safety nets.3 According to World Bank Poverty is an income level below some minimum level necessary to meet basic needs. This minimum level is usually called the poverty line. What is necessary to satisfy basic needs varies across time and societies. Therefore, poverty lines vary in time and place, and each country uses lines which are appropriate to its level of development, societal norms and values. But the content of the needs is more or less the same everywhere. Poverty is hunger. Poverty is lack of shelter. Poverty is being sick and not being able to see a doctor. Poverty is not having access to school and not knowing how to read. Poverty is not having a job, is fear for the future, living one day at a time. Poverty is losing a child to illness brought about by unclean water. Poverty is powerlessness, lack of representation and freedom.4 Poverty is not confined to the rural regions only; it envelops the urban areas too. It is a boundless concept and is omnipresent however its gravity may differ. The pace of socioeconomic growth is comparatively high in the urban regions, leading to a wider gap between the standards of living of the elite with respect to their neighbours. Several significant changes have taken place in India since independence. Some of these changes are distinctly visible - especially in the economic sphere with adoption of new technologies, diversified production, and sophisticated management. Changes have also taken place in the social sphere - with affirmative action for disadvantaged communities, with the weakening of untouchability and caste discrimination, and with women enjoying by and large more freedoms than ever before. On the political front, India has remained a vibrant democracy with increased participation by women and men in political decision making. 5 However, in terms of achievements, India's performance during the past 50 years has been decidedly mixed. From a human development perspective, the glass can be considered half-full or half-empty; much depends upon the eye of the beholder. The country has recorded impressive

http://filipspagnoli.wordpress.com/2009/01/08/human-rights-facts-94-what-is-poverty-different-definitions-ofpoverty-and-an-attempt-to-make-some-order/, last seen at 13.2.13 4 Ibid 5 A. K. Shiva Kumar, Poverty and Human Development in India: Getting Priorities Right , available at http://hdr.undp.org/en/reports/global/hdr1996/papers/a_k_shiva_kumar.pdf.

gains in many areas, significant reductions in the intensity of poverty, but there is still much ground to cover in terms of ending human deprivations.6

Ibid

VIOLATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS DUE TO POVERTY

Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, states- All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. The question to be raised here is, that doesnt the term equal also include within its ambit economic equality as well? Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control. 7 But the harsh reality is that still at least 29.8% of the India lives below the poverty line8 thereby meaning that these 29.8% people have been deprived of the basic standard of living, and that is the reason why they are falling in the category of below the poverty line. Of the many violations of human rights that can be listed, none is worse than poverty -the mother of all human rights violations. Amnesty Internationals Secretary General for the past eight years, Khan opened with a critique of current anti-poverty approaches that concentrate on investment, trade, new technology and foreign aid. Khan claimed that economic analysis does not provide the full picture and economic solutions alone cannot end the problems of poverty. Using a wealth of socioeconomic data, testimony of poor people and firsthand observation, Khan explains how poor people are trapped in a vicious cycle of deprivation, insecurity, exclusion and powerlessness. Economic measures alone cannot address these issues which are essentially about the denial of human rights problems and which impoverish and keep people poor. 9 The former South African President, Mr. Nelson Mandela, speaking at the Heads of the Non Aligned Nations Conference held on 2.9.1998 in Durban highlighted the immediate need to fight poverty when he said: "We have to remark to our common world anew. The violence we see all around us, against people who are as human as we are, who sit in privileged positions, must
7 8

Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights http://censusindia.gov.in/2011-common/CensusDataSummary.html 9 Irene Khan, The Unheard Truth: Poverty and Human Rights,

surely be addressed in a decisive and sustained manner. I speak here of the violence of hunger which kills, of the violence of homelessness which kills, of the violence of the joblessness which kills, of the violence of the Malaria and HIV/AIDS which kill of the trade in narcotics which kills."10 There is no doubt that freedom from severe poverty is among the most important human interests. We are physical being who need access to safe food and water, clothing, shelter, and basic medical care in order to live well- indeed, in order to live at all. People living in severe property lack secure access to sufficient quantities of these basic necessities. Two out of five children in the developing world are stunted, one in three is underweight, and one in ten is wasted.11 Some 250 Million children between 5 and 14 do wage work outside their householdoften under harsh or cruel conditions, as prostitutes or domestic servants, or in agriculture, construction, textile or carpet industry. 12 Despite the undisputed great importance of such basic necessities for human life, there is not agreement on whether human beings have rights, or human right, to the necessities of life. Supernational, national and subnational systems of law create various human rights. The content of these rights and of any corresponding legal obligations and burdens depends on the legislative, judicial and executive bodies that maintain and interpret the laws in question. In the aftermath of World War II, it has come to widely acknowledged that there are also moral human rights, whose validity is independent of any and all governmental bodies. Only if they respect moral human rights do any governmental bodies have legitimacy, that is, the capacity to create moral obligations to comply with, and the moral authority to enforce their laws and others.13 Freedom of an individual, which is the postulate of human rights, obviously can have no meaning so long as the poor in the country do not have their economic conditions improved and

10

Rajindar Sanchar ,Poverty - the mother of all human http://www.pucl.org/reports/National/poverty.htm, last seen at 13.2.12
11 12

rights

violations,

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FAO 1999, 11 www.ilo.org/public/english/standards/ipec/simpoc/stats/4stt.htm, last seen at 13.2.13 13 Thomas W Pogge, Severe Poverty as a Human Rights Violation, available at http://portal.unesco.org/shs/es/files/4363/10980840881Pogge_29_August.pdf/Pogge%2B29%2BAugust.pdf, last seen at 13.2.12

the discrimination based on privilege do not become mere memories instead of becoming more and more aggressive as time passes on.14 If we define poverty as non-fulfillment of any kind of human right then this approach would obliterate any conceptual distinction between poverty and non- fulfillment of human rights by definition, but it would not be appropriate to do so. For it would clearly be odd to characterize certain cases of non- fulfillment of rights as poverty, no matter how deplorable those cases may be. For instance, if a tyrant denies his political opponent the right to speak freely, that by itself would not make the latter poor in any plausible sense. Certainly a deprivation has occurred in this case, but it seems implausible to characterize this deprivation as poverty. The reason it seems implausible is that when viewed as a social problem, and in the context of practical policy-making, the concept of poverty has acquired a specific connotation that ties it closely with lack of command over economic resources. 15 Amartya Sens Capability Approach discusses poverty with respect to underlying the capability approach is a specific conception of what constitutes human well-being. At a very basic level, well-being can be thought of as the quality or the well-ness of a persons being or living, and living itself can be seen as consisting of a set of interrelated functionings the things that a person can do or be. The level of well-being thus depends on the level of those functionings, i.e. how well a person can do or be the things she has reasons to value for example, to what extent can she be free from hunger or take part in the life of a community, and so on. The concept of capability refers to a persons freedom or opportunities to achieve well -being in this sense. To see the relevance of capability for understanding poverty, we may begin by noting that the defining feature of a poor person is that she has very restricted opportunities to pursue her wellbeing. Poverty can thus be seen as low levels of capability, or, as Sen puts it, the failure of basic capabilities to reach certain minimally acceptable levels Human rights would be fully realized, if all human beings had secure access to the objects of these rights. Our world is today very far from this ideal. Piecing together the current global record, we find that most of the current massive underfulfillment of human rights is more or less
14

Rajindar Sanchar ,Poverty - the mother of all human http://www.pucl.org/reports/National/poverty.htm, last seen at 13.2.13
15

rights

violations,

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A. Sen, Inequality Re-examined, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1992, p. 107.

directly connected to poverty. The connection is direct in the case of basic social and economic human rights, such as the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of oneself and ones family, including food, clothing, housing, and medical care. The connection is more indirect in the case of civil and political human rights associated with democratic government and the rule of law. Desperately poor people, often stunted, illiterate, and heavily preoccupied with the struggle to survive, typically lack effective means for resisting or rewarding their rulers, who are therefore likely to rule them oppressively while catering to the interests of other, often foreign, agents (governments and corporations, for instance) who are more capable of reciprocation.16

16

Thomas Pogge, Poverty and Human Rights, available at http://www2.ohchr.org/english/issues/poverty/expert/docs/Thomas_Pogge_Summary.pdf, last seen at 13.2.13

OPPOSING THE COMMON BELIEF THAT POVERTY VIOLATES HUMAN RIGHTS

Poverty does not fit this definition of rights. Who is depriving the poor of their right to an adequate income? There are many theories of poverty, but few of them lead to a clear identification of the Violator of this right. Moreover, human rights are a clear dichotomy someone violates your rights or they do not. But the line between poor and not-poor is arbitrary it is different in different countries, and on a global scale, many still argue what is the right dividing line that constitutes poverty. So calling poverty a human rights violation does not point to any concrete actions that the violator must stop in order to restore rights to the violated.17 This is propounded by prominent economist William Easterly Easterly argues that for there to be a human rights violation, it is necessary to identify WHOSE rights are being violated and WHO is the violator.18 The only useful definition of human rights is one where a human rights crusader could identify WHOSE rights are being violated and WHO is the violator. That is what historically has led to progress on human rights. The government officers of the slave-owning antebellum US and the slave-owners were violating the rights of slaves leading to activism against such violators that eventually yielded the Emancipation Proclamation. The local southern government officers were violating the civil rights of southern blacks under Jim Crow, leading to activism against these violators that yielded the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. The apartheid government officers in South Africa violated the rights of black South Africans, and activism against these violators brought the end of apartheid. So its disappointing that the 2009 report of Amnesty International is blurring its previous clear focus on human rights to a fuzzy vision that now includes poverty: So many people are living in utter destitutionAs the global economic outlook appears more and more gloomy, hope lies in the determination of human rights defenders willing to challenge entrenched interests despite the risks they face. Social and political progress arguably happens the same way as progress in science or as progress in

17

http://chrisblattman.com/2009/06/05/is-poverty-a-human-rights-violation/, last seen at 13.2.13

18 Oscar Pocasangre, Is Poverty A Human Rights Violation?, available at http://yjhr.wordpress.com/2009/06/05/is-

poverty-a-human-rights-violation/, last seen at 12.2.13

business: somebody precisely defines a problem and somebody hits upon a way to solve that well-defined problem. To confuse poverty and human rights violations is to slow down the solutions to both.19 Others argue that Poverty is a result of the lack of or violation of basic human rights, but it is not in and of itself a violation of human rights. While global poverty is a byproduct of many global societal functions today the eradication of poverty will not come about through the rhetoric of whether or not it is a violation of human rights, but rather through focusing on perpetuating the human rights which bring about a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of [one]self and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care poverty is not a violation of human rights because a violation necessitates a violator, but there is not a single entity or factor clearly to blame for widespread poverty. Second, the poverty line is relative and not easily or consistently defined; consequently it is not clear when the right to live above the line has been violated. While poverty is perpetuated by certain aspects of the global social order and its functions, it is not the cause of poverty; even the cause of poverty is not easily defined or globally consistent. Focusing on poverty as a violation of human rights will not solve or begin to change world poverty, but more importantly it is not an accurate discourse. While there are many factors which contribute to global poverty there is not a single factor which is solely responsible for it or perpetuating it. There are cases, such as genocide, where extreme poverty in a country is caused directly by clear violation of basic human rights, but this does not necessitate that the greater level of poverty induced is in and of itself a violation of the human rights which the genocide violated, rather the resulting poverty is one of the serious outcomes of a horrific violation of human rights. Thomas Pogge argues that affluent countries create the conditions of poverty by imposing the social orders which are difficult to be attained with respect to a standard of living. while the many factors which comprise extreme poverty, such as a lack of food, clothing, housing, education, medical care (etc), are in fact violations of basic human rights they cannot be lumped together as poverty violating human rights because the causes and remedies for each of these factors is not necessarily the same.

19

William Easterly, Poverty is not a Violation of Human Rights, available at http://aidwatchers.com/2009/06/poverty-is-not-a-human-rights-violation/, last seen at 13.2.13

CONCLUSION

The theory on poverty as a violation of human rights, has two sides to it, first being that it does violate human rights of people living in destitute conditions, who have no food, shelter, clothing, etc. and are thereby deprived of the basic standard of living to which everyone is entitled to. Such rights are also enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and although this Declaration does not have a legal sanction to it, but it is largely followed by the countries around the world. Poverty snatches away the right of a person to live contently, and satisfactorily, as it takes away the basic necessities that are needed to sustain a human life. The other approach outrightly denies that poverty violates human rights. What the supporters of this approach contend is that to determine if there is a violation of human rights, then one needs to identify who is the one violating such rights, and whose rights are violated. This is difficult to decipher in the case of poverty since the numbers of poor people are so large, and there is no one violator that can be pin pointed, and eradicated in order to restore their human rights. The basic contention is that who is depriving the poor of the right to an adequate income? Poverty results from the lack of human rights, but poverty in all togetherness is not a violation of human rights. Its true that lack of income, in and of itself, isnt a human rights violation. But poverty is about a lot more than just income. As Easterly knows, those who live on less than a dollar a day are poor not just because they lack income; the lack of income implies lack of access to services, clean drinking water, adequate education, housing, employment and so on. All of these are violations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural rights. Also people living in poverty are vulnerable to violations of their civil and political rights as well. Human rights abuses cause poverty and keep people poor and living in poverty makes you more likely to suffer violations of your human rights. So human rights must be part of any solution to poverty. Also, in order to help termination of poverty to effectively ensure that human rights are reached to everyone, a suggestion made by Amartya Sen, should be incorporated with respect to determining poverty, the minimum nutritional requirements should be translated into minimum food requirements because it to a wide extent depends on the choice of commodities by the

consumers. Malnutrition captures only one of the aspect of the idea of poverty, however it is a very important aspect and it must have a central place in the determination of the conception of poverty. Therefore, the solution to eradicate poverty is not identifying it as a part of non-fulfillment of basic human rights, it is actually identifying the situation of poverty as a complete independent issue, which needs to be addressed immediately by the world, and not in terms of words, but by way of action.