Irene Khan talking:
The poverty rate here in the United States has now risen to 13.2 percent, the highest level in eleven years. And around the world, two billion people, or a full third of humanity, are poor, living on less than two dollars a day. One billion live in extreme poverty, earning less than a dollar a day. The latest numbers from the United Nations indicate that over a billion people are going hungry each day.
A new book from Amnesty International’s secretary general argues that these harsh numbers alone don’t tell the whole story. Economic solutions alone cannot fully address the deprivation, indignity, discrimination, insecurity, repression and violence of poverty. Poverty, the book argues, must be recognized as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
if you ask the poor people, “What’s your condition?” what you hear from them is about discrimination. They can’t get to school because they are women. They can’t get jobs because they’re an ethnic minority. They’re excluded. You hear deprivation. You hear about discrimination, insecurity. Poor people live in fear, fear of losing their jobs, losing their homes, not knowing where their next meal is coming from, and sometimes living in war situations. War impoverishes people.
The reigning approaches to eliminating poverty—foreign aid, technological development, trade, increased trade and investment—these have failed. They have failed very often because the emphasis has been on enrichment rather than empowerment. And if you take Africa, for example, investing in countries like Chad or the Democratic Republic of Congo has only enriched the powerful. A lot of money has been siphoned off. No investment has been made. The local communities haven’t had their voices heard. So participation of people is absolutely essential. Freedom matters, if you’re going to tackle poverty.
There are a billion people in the world who live in slums, and that number will double in the next twenty years. And these are people who are coming, very often, to the city because of human rights violations, because they’ve been pushed off their land, because of poverty, but also because of economic opportunities. And yet, the city doesn’t acknowledge them. They live in illegal neighborhoods without resources.
In Kenya in June, where Kibera is the—Africa’s largest slum. There are a million people living there. There are water pipes that go through Kibera to provide water to the rich neighborhoods, and yet the people of Kibera don’t have clean drinking water. The narrow lanes become sewers when the rains come. So, that’s the way in which billions—a billion people are living in the world, feeding the economy, yet being ignored, with no rights, subject to police brutality, to crime, to violence. This reflects the failure of decades of housing policy, and governments need to focus on the right to housing. Housing is a right under international law.
Healthcare is certainly a human right. Half-a-million women die every year giving childbirth or for pregnancy-related reasons. And pregnancy is not a disease. Women have a right to safe motherhood. People have a right to healthcare. You cannot rely solely on the market to ensure equal opportunities for all. That is why governments have a responsibility, when it comes to human rights. And basic, basic issues, like health, education, security, they are human rights, because, without them, we wouldn’t have human dignity.
President Franklin Roosevelt who talked about freedom from want, not just freedom from fear. And somewhere, in those decades, the US has lost this emphasis on economic and social rights and sees them as not part of the debate of human rights. There will be a recognition that freedom from fear, freedom from want go hand in hand. And the right to health—US is the world’s richest country, and there is no other country in the Western world, among developed countries, that do not provide healthcare to all its citizens. Forty million people without healthcare is shocking.
When it comes to the World Bank, that their own research and their own analysis, when they go talk to the people who are benefiting from their projects, they hear those people tell them that we need freedom alongside investment. And yet, when you look at the poverty reduction strategies that the World Bank develops, they actually acknowledge that, yes, freedom is an issue here, human rights are an issue, but we don’t want to talk about it, because it’s controversial. If you don’t talk about it, you’re not actually getting the most out of your own projects.
Irene Khan, Secretary General of Amnesty International. Born in Bangladesh, she is the first Asian woman to head Amnesty International. She won the Sydney Peace Prize in 2006, and her book, out in the US today, is called The Unheard Truth: Poverty and Human Rights.
– from democracynow.org