Severe poverty as a human rights violation

Abstract

Difficult as it is to admit, poverty cannot be defined in law. In the tension between dealing with poverty & focusing on extreme poverty, there is an indeterminacy that makes democracies inattentive to the economic & 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 & 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, & to find in favors 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 & unavoidable phenomenon in a world that claims to work to guarantee human rights, civil & political rights, economic, social, & cultural rights? 8 References. Adapted from the source document.