Yes, it’s the largest violation of all
According to the philosopher Thomas Pogge, poverty is not only a violation of human rights but also the largest human right violation we face nowadays. In his book “World Poverty and Human Rights”, he states that “some 18 million human beings avoidably die each year from diseases we can prevent, cure or treat” and that “this is equivalent to 50,000 avoidable deaths per day, or one-third of all human diseases” (2008, pp. 222-223). The most significant casual factor determining this distribution, says Pogge, is poverty: nearly all of the avoidable mortality and morbidity occurs in poor countries and especially among their poorest inhabitants.
In one of our previous lectures, professor Marks provoked his students by asking if they agreed poverty was the largest human right violation ever made. None of them, however, seemed to be comfortable enough to affirm this categorically.
By facing everyday consequences of poverty in a developing country like Brazil, where I live, I completely agree with Pogge’s statement. Not in a philosophical way, like he does, but more in an empirical/journalist way, I reached the same conclusion even before reading his texts. Under the risk of showing a narrow point of view or fall into a syllogism, my point here is to contribute with facts I’ve been facing for the last 29 years.
In Peter Uvin’s “Human Rights and Development” (2004, pp. 11), we can find the major rights recognized in the two UN Covenants, related to human rights. To make things clearer, let’s compare some of these rights to the poor’s lives in Brazil and elsewhere.
- The right to life: life expectancy among poor people is more than 30 years lower than the richer ones around the world, according to WHO; unfortunately, the official Brazilian institute of statistics doesn’t have an overall number proving it, but, if we compare poor stares to rich ones, the discrepancy can be even higher than 30 years
- Freedom from torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment: after Brazil became a “democratic” country in the 80’s, I haven’t heard of torture of intellectuals or left-wing activists, for example; however, there’s hardly a day when we don’t receive information of poor people living in “favelas” (slums) who were tortured by policemen, who, sometimes under pressure, push them to confess a crime against a rich citizen
- Freedom from slavery: a few blocks from where I work, poor Bolivian immigrants who come to Brazil looking for better standard of living work on a 20-hour/seven-day basis and locked by Chinese and Korean traders
- Freedom from arbitrary arrest and detention; the right to humane and respectful treatment of persons lawfully deprived of their liberty; equal protection of the law: most jails in Brazil are overcrowded, and prisoners face all sorts of degrading treatment (literally in cages with more than 10 times its capacity); a law allows prisoners who attended university to have a separate room, much more comfortable (let’s just remind more than 95% of students who reach university level in Brazil belong to high classes)
- Freedom of movement and liberty to choose one’s place of residence for everyone lawfully within the territory of a state: can we consider freedom of movement when every single day thousands of migrants leave their homes in the Northeast to the Southeast and South states because their children are starving and there’s not even a drop of water to drink? What about the 33 million homeless people we have in Brazil, according to the UN?
- Equality before courts and tribunal: recently it was approved a law in Brazil that forbids federal policemen to arrest people with handcuffs, so that these people (often rich politicians) cannot be exposed to bad images on TV; every other day, however, poor pickpockets are arrested and showed on TV by lower levels of policemen with handcuffs. So, what’s the difference???
- The right to marry and found a family with free and full consent of the intending spouses: as I wrote in my last article, I had already interviewed about 10 girls who were raped by their own dads –and had their sons and daughters, all of them living in shanty towns. Yes, usually with full consent of the spouses
- The right of minorities to enjoy their own culture, profess and practice their own religion, or to use their own language: definitely, this is respected in Brazil. Caucasian people here, a minority group of the population, are actually almost the only ones to enjoy their own culture and whatever they want to
- The right to work: officially, there are about 9% of unemployed people in Brazil; in practice, however, the vast majority of poor people have non-legal jobs, with no social security at all and with very low income. Our minimum wage is about USD 270, which are definitely not enough to cover with dignity all the basic expenses (lodging, food, education, health, clothing and transport) in big cities, where most people live (how much would that be in the US?)
- The right to the enjoyment of just and favorable conditions of work: in 2006, when criminal organization named PCC (First Command of the Capital) attacked all Sao Paulo city (news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4770097.stm), burning buses, shooting at official buildings and killing people in the streets, I entered a slum for the first time at three in the morning to cover the attacks. I interviewed many people who were already going to work. Not because they had early shifts, but because of lack of transportation. They had to walk about three hours every single day to reach a bus terminal from where it took more two hours to the houses they cleaned, in the rich neighborhoods, where they were supposed to be at 8am sharp
- The right to the protection of the family: in 2008, in an interview in the outskirts of Curitiba, a big Brazilian city, Mrs. Iraci told me: “I feel very lucky! Now I have tomato sauce to put over the pasta I serve my children once a week! This is pure luxury and it shows how better we’ve been living”.
I could easily go on with other rights (physical and mental health, education, cultural life…) and even each of the mentioned rights deserved a whole article for itself, but there would be no space for it.
To conclude, I’d say that, facing all these facts and many more, we can call it misery, condition of unfortunate people, fate, whatever we can name it, but I’m definitely sure that avoidable poverty is the largest atrocity we commit every single day regarding human rights. It’s happening right now, while we comfortably discuss human rights here.
© 2010, Cássio Aoqui. All rights reserved.