Poverty as a human rights violation

In: International social science journal: ISSJ, Heft 180

Abstract

Difficult as it is to admit, poverty cannot be defined in law. In the tension between dealing with poverty and focusing on extreme poverty, there is an indeterminacy that makes democracies inattentive to the economic and social dynamics of poverty as inequality. As a result, responses to extreme poverty, especially when they are explicitly targeted or preferential, violate the fundamental equality of rights and dignity that they are supposed, formally, to express. Measures for the underprivileged thus do not offer them a way out from their status, but rather, paradoxically, lead them to qualify their suffering, and to find in favours received the strength to think of themselves as poor without being exposed to the terrors of extreme poverty. In a sense, such people, who depend on minimal welfare granted to them, have no "rights". Should we thus learn to think of poverty as an inevitable and unavoidable phenomenon in a world that claims to work to guarantee human rights, civil and political rights, economic, social, and cultural rights? (Original abstract)