"The Poverty of Rights, Human Rights and the Eradication of Poverty"

THIS BOOK CONTAINS a selection of papers from two workshops held in Latin America (Santiago de Chile in 1997 and near Mexico City in 1999) that both sought to break new ground in discussing the political aspects of reducing poverty. In the context of open economies and capital flows, society becomes increasingly unjust. Concrete measures to reduce poverty and practical steps to respect human rights enshrined in international and national legal systems are the two, not necessarily related, issues brought together in this book.

The contributors, who are mainly Latin American, include lawyers and social scientists from a number of disciplines. They pay particular attention to indigenous peoples and their struggle against poverty, and explore a range of important questions relating to the intersection of human rights and poverty, including the relatively new notion of the right to development. The specific focus of much of the book is based in Latin America because Latin America is both the region in the world with the greatest inequities in the distribution of wealth and income, and a relatively wealthy region in terms of GDP in comparison to Africa, South Asia or most of the Middle East. This combination makes it simultaneously one of the world’s most explosive and most hopeful arenas for meaningful social transformation. The other major theme concerns the explicit incorporation and potential for action of international human rights’ norms into national constitutional and legal frameworks as an integral part of the overall struggle to ensure the reduction and, ultimately, the eradication of global poverty and social injustice. Even if “the law is not a panacea”, it provides an indispensable basis and/or complement to successful social mobilization. Since the three central problems in Latin America are social inequality, the increasing vulnerability of large sectors of the population and increasing social exclusion, social rights are the gateway to building citizenship and participatory democracy, which seems to be the most useful of the various models where social rights are conceived as a part of the process.

One section of the book is oriented towards a conceptualization of different notions: for example, social policy in terms of two rival models of citizenship, showing the possibility for alternatives to its present configurations that predominantly foster and reflect a dependent form of citizenship in Latin America. Then, human rights are developed as a new paradigm. A major part is dedicated to case studies which demonstrate the need to respect and harmonize development and human rights when initiating a development process. One example discusses Panama, a country with increasing levels of poverty but which paradoxically knows high growth rates in its economy. Other papers illustrate human rights, poverty and indigenous peoples’ struggles. Finally the authors propose recommendations to alleviate the poverty and extreme inequality.
Throughout the book, some interesting questions are raised such as: Is the production of wealth a means or an end of development? Is the ultimate objective of a process of material accumulation to serve people and not just the creation of wealth in and of itself? Can we develop an economy without a society, or one that is in fact anti-social? From these, one can think about economic growth, about politics, legal means, ethics, social aspects, environment… and the poverty of rights. This book will be of interest to academics, practitioners and students, as well as those with a more general interest in the eradication of poverty.