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 manufactured by our societies. To address this question is essential for the preservation of our own humanity. As human rights activists, 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 poverty will only cease when it is recognized as a violation of human 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, economic and social rights– (proclaimed by the Universal Declaration of HR as inherent to the human person), poverty violates the 5^th; generally the 4^th; often the 3^rd; and sometimes the 2^nd and even the 1^st family. The systematic violation of anyone of these rights rapidly degenerates into poverty.

3. HR violations are not just 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 international community will be jointly liable.

4. Poverty is poorly defined by the law. Poverty is about material wellbeing, bodily wellbeing, social wellbeing, psychological 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 destitute 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 people rendered poor “as silent as things.” (Reinhard Maria Rilke)

5. The struggle against poverty demands more pressing legal actions –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 record 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 globalization. As a consequence, poverty is now regarded as an unavoidable fact. States no longer have the objective of eradicating it, but eventually of dealing with the most visible situations that 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; consumers matter foremost. The right to subsistence is, for example, interpreted minimally (having barely enough to subsist, e. g, the $2/day the MDGs aim for, is not enough to live under decent conditions). Further, the logic of profit-making generates the rise of unemployment and under-employment, exclusion, impoverishment 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 satisfaction 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 influence on the fight against poverty, the purpose of our struggle for equal rights is to combat undue privilege and arbitrary hierarchies. 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

cschuftan@phmovement.org