ABSTRACT
The violation of the right to a reasonable standard of living entails the violation of all the other human rights, since their observance is quite simply made materially and structurally impossible. Poverty aggravates discrimination since it particularly affects women, the elderly and the disabled. Poverty is a situation of insecurity, whereas extreme poverty is a spiral of different kinds of insecurity, with each kind aggravating the effects of the others in a circular process that hems the individual in completely. Though one is dismayed to find that so little attention has been paid to poverty and extreme poverty in the logic of human rights, the explanation for this is unhappily simple: a poor person hardly exists and can only lay claim, modestly, to ‘poor’ rights. The most important moral imperative is to give serious attention to the indivisibility of human rights and to incorporate it into our legal and political systems.
