Poverty is a Violation of Human Rights

AUSTRALIA, August 1, 2005 Human rights would be fully realised, if all human beings had secure access to the objects of these rights. Our world is today very far from this ideal. Piecing together the global record, we find that most of the current massive underfulfillment of human rights is more or less directly connected to poverty. Roughly one third of all human deaths – about 50,000 daily – are due to poverty-related causes (pdf file 60KB), easily preventable through better nutrition, safe drinking water, mosquito nets, re-hydration packs, vaccines and other medicines. This amounts to 300 million deaths in just the 16 years since the end of the Cold War – more than the 200 million deaths caused by all the wars, civil wars, and government repression of the entire 20th century.

Never has poverty been so easily avoidable. The collective annual expenditure of the 2,735 million people living below the World Bank’s “$2 a day” poverty line is about $400 billion. Their collective shortfall from that poverty line is roughly $300 billion per year. This is 1.1 per cent of the gross national incomes of the high-income countries, which totals $27,732 billion.

Tim Williams of Australia draws our attention to this link.
Center for Applied philosophy and Public Ethics