by Laura Freschi A new report slams the UK’s aid agency with accusations of spending money on “Fake Aid.” Produced by the London-based International Policy Network (IPN), “Fake Aid” casts a critical eye on the agency’s communications programming, findi…

After a string of deadly serious blogs on random variables and statistical evidence, industrial policy, the history of development thought, and Afghanistan issues, I think I’ve earned a break to do another (hopefully the last) in our popular series on…

I dont agree with you that poverty does not imply human rights violation. It does but we should look at who is responsible. The arguments of many people infer the avoidance of responsibility to help the poor. You may not help but dont think that the poor dont have right to better health, improved income, standard education, etc–

You are right on the obligation concept, but take things inside out as I wrote it and consider extreme richness a violation of human rights, then the obligation of the government would be to impose a limitation on the salaries, easy to do no ? and gives a lot of money to erradicate extreme poverty… but only a world government could do such a thing… that is, I agree, anticapitalist…

But understand that to me it is THE PROBLEM…

A ‘right’ infers an obligation.

If absence of poverty is to be assessed a right, it implies that someone is under obligation to provide wealth to everyone who is poor.

Who might that someone be? Certainly, the first obligation must fall upon the government of the citizen, failing that – who? Everyone else.

Likewise, when progressives are always expanding the concept of ‘human rights’ to include among other things:

Healthcare; Childcare; Welfare; Peace; Education; Leisure; limited work hours, etc.

All of this implies that it is the obligation of someone, usually the government to provide it.

“Allowing deprivation of an adequate standard of living, would be a violation of Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Article 25.

(1) 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.”

So I keep my first answer, Poverty is a human right violation. The good point is to mind that the violator is somehow diffused in our society… but I think that if we’d all agree that poverty was a human rights violation we might develop the tools to find out what is in cause and find out the actions to resolve this cause…

Maybe our capitalist system is to blame, it concentrates the power and make us forget about poverty… maybe the problem is on the mass consumption system that causes the need for cheap labour and cheap products that can only be produced if there is a poor society somewhere….

In all of those options I think we are all to blame for this… we are the violators of the UDHR… We gain more money than we need in order to stop working one day… to keep living we definatly need someone to work for us somewhere and that someone is a poor women in a rural area of Ghana or Bolivia…

On the other side, the UDHR is really subjective, one could say that an adequate standard of living is what people live in Mali and that there aint no such thing as extreme poverty, there is only extreme richness… and that is what we need to eradicate… And think about it, it would be much more easy to change how 1% of the world population live than half of it…but is it really ?

Then maybe extreme richness is the violation of the human rights and poverty is only a consequence of this violation…

By William Easterly Last Friday’s post “Poverty is not a human rights violation” spurred a very healthy dialogue on rights, including a response from Amnesty International , which mentioned the UN Declaration of Human Rights. I will not be a…

The issue with regard to human rights is always: is the fact, claimed to be a right, an important fact? Didn’t know that, did you, clown?

Your grasp of history is so bad that you don’t even realize the argument on the basis of which slavery was eliminated: freedom from involuntary servitude is an important fact. Indeed, the argument Lincoln used against it was historically based: it didn’t work, it was constantly subverted, and it destroyed government, which he also considered an important fact. (His evidence that slavery destroyed government was the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the response it provoked.)

The Court uses “maintenance” explicitly in both West Coast Hotel v. Parrish (1937) and a case which is used to stand for the proposition that the political system has unlimited power over all facts, Berman v. Parker.

We are in the process of elevating maintenance to an important fact,getting rid of the scrutiny regime–which comes from a corrupt misreading of West Coast–and establishing the maintenance regime, which stands for the proposition that the law maintains important facts. The old scrutiny regime, under which we “live” now, stands for the proposition that the law has a rational relation to a legitimate government purpose. That has led to the deterioration of the society, because it is simply a police state formulation.

Whether making “maintenance” an individually enforceable right, eliminates “poverty” I don’t know, but I do know that your analysis is so ignorant that it hardly deserves the term “analysis.” From under which rock did you crawl? You’re scum. Witness your inability to describe what, in fact, is poverty: “adequate income,” please! That lame definition shows that you have not researched the facts AT ALL. Adequate to what? But that would lead a churl like you much further into FACTS than you are intellectually capable of going. Goombah.

We’re also in the process of elevating other facts to important facts, which means that there will be vastly expanded individually enforceable rights in them: housing, liberty, education and medical care.

Just see my book, you scum.

As destitution by definition is “extreme want which threatens life unless relieved” (Webster), it follows that AI is referring to poverty which deprives people of an adequate standard of living. This blog’s author thus mistakenly defines the human rights violation in question as a “right to an adequate income”.

Allowing deprivation of an adequate standard of living, would be a violation of Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Article 25.

(1) 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.

As human rights enshrined in the Declaration are meant to be the responsibilities of governments, it is clear who a violator is in allowing poverty.

That is absolutely correct if one means that human rights haven’t highly-specified decision-rules on allocation decisions for all circumstances in which scarcity plays a role.

On the other hand, human rights do (or normatively should), play a role in the process of decision-making in allocation of scarce resources. They constrain certain choices — ruling out, for instance, an allocation that is discriminatory on the grounds of gender, race, ethnicity, or political/religious affiliation — but also, and more importantly, establishes a procedural requirement that affected persons be allowed to meaningfully participate in the decision-making process and, finally, require that remedies (judicial and others) be available for when such requirements are not met.

So although human rights law, as presently construed, doesn’t make allocation decisions, it tells you which allocations are not compatible with human rights, and establishes procedural safeguards for legitimizing the decision-making process.

“They must take place on the institutional level (…) which, in turn, makes human rights look a lot more like political rights than universal rights”

I confess I don’t quite grasp the distinction being made here. It would be interesting to know more about it.