Beyond the Rhetoric of Social Rights for the Poor: the Need to Promote a Methodology aimed at Reinforcing International and National Institutions

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As Christine Chinkin once asked, is poverty an international legal problem? Answering positively to this question, as Chinkin does,raises interesting questions for all those engaged in the international fight against poverty and extreme poverty. If poverty is a human rights issue, the quest for the eradication of poverty must be resolved accordingly to human rights substantive and institutional standards. Human rights can serve as a powerful qualifier for any strategy aimed at eradicating poverty. Human rights are not only about quantifying basic needs. They speak to the core of human dignity by asking for political, democratic, material and economic changes that respond and respect the standards set by human rights instruments. They call upon state and non-state actors to meet their obligations as duty-bearers to the benefit of rights-holders. Yet, in the land of poverty eradication strategies, everybody is not pulling in the same direction. If nobody nowadays denies the relevance of a human rights framework, some are tempted to play ”pick and choose” from the basket of interdependent human rights established by a set of human rights instruments, general principles of international law and jus cogens as well. This opportunistic approach to human rights is dangerous. First, it carries the risk that the politics of poverty priorizes certain rights and liberties at the cost of denying the principle of interdependency, embedded in the human rights theory. Secondly, it also could move the analysis of poverty as a human rights violation over to a parallel track where political institutions and actors do not pay sufficient attention to treaty body monitoring work. This paper wishes to explore such questions in an historical perspective, Part (1) will quickly survey the history (1970-2000) of the building of an institutional relationship between poverty and economic and social rights. Part (II) will illustrate how poverty and extreme poverty became a constant preoccupation of Treaty bodies’ mechanisms, which found, in case after case, reasons to state and unfold the relation between human rights violations and poverty. Part (III) proposes that economic and social rights, and more specifically the CESCR (UN International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights), are at the core of the analysis suggesting that poverty is a human rights’ violation. It also proposes a methodological approach to economic and social rights violations, which can support the claim of the interconnection between poverty, extreme poverty with economic and social rights violations. Part (IV) will focus on the multiple institutionalization requirements of those rights at the national and international levels. Finally, Part (V) will explore the question of States’ responsibility toward non-State actors in an era of globalization and neoliberalism as far as the protection and the promotion of social rights are concerned. This document is aimed at showing the necessity, and the promising methodology, of paying specific attention to the requirements of economic and social rights in the contextof the fight to eradicate poverty. In addition, this paper hopes to contribute towards resolving the confusion between the political and the legal approaches that are nevertheless both required in order to eradicate poverty and extreme poverty.