International Poverty Law: An Emerging Discourse

Legal rules significantly affect the distribution of income, assets and power. Background rules of property (now including intellectual property), family, contract, legal capacity and tort law partially create and perpetuate wealth imbalances within and between nations. Thus, whether one is considering current economic structures within nation-states, those earlier imposed by colonizers on colonized states, or those dominating the increasingly globalized economy, legal rules are deeply implicated in maintaining and strengthening status quo power and wealth inequalities, resulting in substantial poverty worldwide. This book seeks to understand and expose these legal structures that perpetuate poverty, and to develop new strategies for reducing poverty, locally and globally.

While law and development discourse has dealt with international poverty, advocates of poverty reduction customarily operate within a nation-state context. The contributors to this book, while largely, although not exclusively, relying on human rights discourse and United Nations, International Labour Organization and World Trade Organization initiatives as their primary legal sources, begin to position international poverty law as a legitimate field for transnational, multidisciplinary legal research and dialogue. While critiquing both legal theory and current policy, they nevertheless open up a constructive prospect of specific arenas in which the development of international poverty law can contribute to addressing poverty reduction.

The first chapters in this book are revisions of papers originally presented at the Comparative Research Programme on Poverty (CROP) Law and Poverty Workshop IV, in Onati, Spain, in May 2001. The first three chapters provide a framework within which to position the theoretical development of International Poverty Law (IPL). These chapters stress the importance of the human rights discourse in constructing the foundation for IPL, while simultaneously cautioning that a rights model must be supplemented by other moral and political approaches, including theorizing some human rights as “global public goods”.

Building on the theoretical framework set forth in these chapters, the next five chapters explore specific international human rights initiatives that address a particular aspect of poverty within distinct local and methodological contexts. These chapters grapple with a range of subjects, including:
· international intellectual property (IP) law as applied to biological products and processes, and their impact on undermining food security;
· the framing of the right to food (RTF) within the UN development documents;
· linkages between international human rights undertakings and the developing interpretation of the new 1996 South African constitution;
· the impact of international human rights initiatives on the extent and causes of child labour and school attendance in India; and
· the role of transnational corporations (TNCs) in bridging the gaps between economic growth and human development through corporate codes of conduct.

The book’s final chapter provides an overview of human rights documents, and connects IPL to this textual framework. It looks at a number of international human rights instruments, and positions them within the varying conceptions of poverty (subsistence, basic needs, relative deprivation), and recommends specific steps to ensure the indivisibility and direct applicability of international human rights norms. The editor of the book, in her conclusion, acknowledges that while advocacy for incremental change is an essential component of legal representation for the poor, ultimately poverty cannot be eradicated or even seriously challenged without changes in market-structuring rules (both national and international). “If IPL does not challenge the background legal rules of markets that bear significant responsibility for causing and perpetuating gross inequality, it will ultimately