ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we analyse a UNESCO initiative – the Poverty as a Human Rights Violation Project – which, led by Pierre Sané, Assistant DirectorGeneral (ADG) for the Social and Human Sciences (SHS), and formerly head of Amnesty International (AI), sought to structure UNESCO’s poverty strategy around the claim that ‘poverty is a violation of human rights’ and around the idea of ‘abolition’. Our aim is to trace the trajectory of the claim – that poverty is a violation of human rights – within UNESCO, and relate the promotion of such a view to UNESCO’s mandate, organisational structure and the role that political forces can have in promoting or preventing specific approaches. Of particular importance is the role of powerful countries, such as the United States, and the ways in which ideas in the multilateral system fit or do not fit with widely spread norms and beliefs. We will argue that the initiative’s core idea proved to be too radical for UNESCO, which attempted to tone down its controversial wording. But our analysis will take up the broader themes we are concerned with in this book – such as the role of UNESCO in the multilateral system, and the problems that arise when a multilateral institution attempts to adopt ethical language and to address matters of global justice which do not fit well with the instrumentalised, depoliticised and allegedly value-free ideas and approaches that dominate global policy discourse. To assert that freedom from poverty is a human right is a controversial claim,
implying a substantial divergence from standard approaches to the challenge of poverty. But it has acquired some currency in recent years with the revamping of human rights discourse at the global level, as we have shown in Chapter 3. The difference between the phrases ‘freedom from’ and ‘violation of ’, appearing in the statements of, for example, former High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson, may to some seem not very significant. But the term ‘violation’ has in fact proved controversial when explicitly used in a global institution’s strategy – raising, as it does, issues of accountability and responsibility, and the indivisibility of socio-economic from liberty rights, and thus proving particularly challenging to well established beliefs of
rich and powerful countries. To claim that poverty is a violation of human rights establishes poverty as a new category of political thought. The statement is value laden and thus action guiding. Not only does the language of violation convey considerations of duties and responsibilities in a more unequivocal way than the language of freedom, it also challenges dominant expert ideas about poverty that are favoured by global organisations. The language of violation implies a relational approach between wealth and poverty that is difficult to ignore, placing advanced and developing countries, developers and the developed, within a common framework. To characterise poverty as a violation of human rights can perhaps influence attitudes to poverty – moving away from the notion that poverty is the responsibility of the poor themselves, or of their states. The term ‘violation’ entails that poverty is not only bad, but wrong, calling for serious and immediate action and preventive measures. The claim that poverty is a violation of some globally recognised set of human rights re-politicises the global poverty debate and presents it as a question of global justice; its abolition, a question of political will, and global institutions as key actors in working towards the responsibility to protect people from poverty. As we have seen, the characterisation of poverty as a question of human
rights originates within the UN system institutions, but has also had a history within ethical and religious movements as well as among movements of struggle and contestation. For our purposes in this book it is important to situate the emergence, trajectory and evolution of the use of the term ‘violation’ in relation to global organisational structures and global power relations.1 As our earlier chapters show, the fate of this approach to poverty may in part be determined by the way in which current global politics develop in the coming years, and the power and moral authority of the institutions that promote ‘global ideas’. Just as other ideas, and associated policies, were in the past heavily influenced by Cold War relations, the fate of a human rights view of poverty may depend not so much on conceptual clarification as on changes in the global political situation. But ideas that challenge power relations are often denied the necessary critical and ethical space. This chapter shows how even an institution free of the constraints facing development organisations such as UNDP and the World Bank found it problematic to implement quite a modest initiative – to explore the implications of an alternative perspective on poverty and human rights – and was required to curtail it, or at best keep it ‘under the radar’.
