15/11/2010 Social Affairs, Health and Sustainable Development
There is a vicious circle in which extreme poverty equates with the denial of all human rights. Human rights are interdependent and interconnected. The loss of one leads to the loss of others. Conversely access to one human right offers access to others. Examples of this interdependence are a precarious financial situation, bad housing, poor education, job insecurity and almost non-existent social and family support networks. Poverty leads to social exclusion and vice versa. These are some of the conclusions of a hearing on "combating poverty", organised by the Social Affairs Committee in Paris today. It should culminate in a report by Luca Volontè (Italy, EPP/CD) to the next session of the PACE.
According to those taking part, if we really want to eliminate extreme poverty, we need to be guided by the concept of human rights and universal respect for human dignity. It is no longer enough to rely on statistics and charity. Our approach now must be to focus on rights and access to these rights without discrimination. In line with this principle, they sounded a warning about the EU's goal of reducing by 20 million the number of poor in Europe by 2020. This was tantamount to abandoning millions of persons. Such an objective could reinforce exclusion by concealing inequalities and encouraging member states to concentrate on those who were most easily reached and best equipped to escape poverty, at the expense of the poorest and most marginalised members of the community. Governments should really set objectives such as ensuring that within ten years no one lacked decent housing and that within five years not a single young person left the education system without proper schooling.
Participants stressed the importance of a system in which the victims of human rights violations could hold those responsible to account for their actions, or their unwillingness to act, not least through the machinery of the European Court of Human Rights. New forms of governance and participation were also needed at all levels - local, national and international. Finally action needed to be taken as soon as people approached the poverty threshold, particularly when young children were concerned, though the latter should not be separated from their parents. The message was that avoiding and preventing poverty was the best means of combating it.
“Clearly, financial poverty is one of the most dramatic aspects of the problem. However my report will also reflect other aspects of poverty, such as capacity for inclusion in society – through the strengthening of family ties and more general participation in public life – and a whole raft of measures already available to prevent it from arising in the first place”, concluded the rapporteur, Luca Volontè.