Combating Child Poverty--Human Rights Approaches

Abstract

Human rights needs to be more than the poetry of individual affirmation. Yet by attempting to use international human rights law as one of the tools to help combat child poverty, one risks being labelled a Don Quixote naively jousting at windmills. This attitude is surely defeatist, as human rights has always been concerned with major and urgent challenges. The raison d'etre of human rights law is the upholding of human dignity. People have a legitimate expectation that international human rights law can and must be used to help eradicate gross inequalities, including inequalities of resources. International human rights law is a peaceful but powerful instrument of change. In essence, human rights is about peacefully redistributing unequal power. Over the past quarter of a century, international human rights law has had an increasingly creative role in shaping the public agenda, framing the nature of the citizen's rights discourse, and creating an embryonic culture of children's rights within the state.2 So far, however, despite repeated claims