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	Implementation of human rights standards remains an ongoing challenge in Europe by Thomas Hammarberg European Commissioner for Human Rights   Apr 2011   “Progress in implementing human rights is too slow and the agreed standards are not consistently enforced. The implementation gap is wide”, stated the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, Thomas Hammarberg when presenting his annual report. “What I have seen and heard during my activities in 2010 has made me deeply impatient.”   The report identifies fields in which stronger political action is required. In particular, the Commissioner underlines that little improvement has been achieved in the living conditions of Roma people, not least in access to education, housing, health and employment.   “We must aim at deepening Roma inclusion in society, widening their political representation and establishing broader opportunities for them to actively participate in community life.”   Another concern is the rise in xenophobic and racist tendencies. “Nationalist and extremist groups have exploited these feelings for electoral purposes and too little has been done to oppose these extremist tendencies. I have been disappointed that leading politicians have not stood up more strongly for human rights principles in public discourse.”   Too many political leaders have failed to counter Islamophobic stereotypes. They have not made clear that Muslims are an integral part of our multicultural Europe and that they have been contributing a great deal to Europe’s development over the centuries.   “It is high time that political leaders publicly recognised this fact and took more resolute action against hate crimes and discrimination. If multiculturalism has failed it is because it has not been given a real chance.”   Xenophobic tendencies have also influenced policies on migration, including the reception of refugees and asylum-seekers.   “More is needed to establish humane migration management. As illustrated by the current crisis in North Africa, we need a new common European policy on migration and asylum which also distributes the responsibility for reception more evenly and fairly among member states.”   As concerns media freedom, the Commissioner observes shortcomings in several European states.   “Some governments take action to prevent even modest and peaceful criticism in the media. Public service broadcasting is made dependent on government guidance and frequencies for radio and television have been allocated on political criteria. Media pluralism is also threatened by monopolistic tendencies and oligarch ownership of media outlets.”   Commissioner Hammarberg is also concerned by widespread impunity in criminal cases. “Impunity denies the very scope of the rule of law that we promote. This has been the case in regard to a number of notorious assassinations of journalists and human rights defenders.   In some of these cases the contract killer has been identified but not the forces behind them and the investigations have not always been sufficiently professional and well supported.”   The Commissioner further notes the increase in inequalities in Europe.   “Austerity budgets tend to have a more negative impact on the most vulnerable groups of people, including children, the elderly and persons with disabilities. The right to a decent job is undermined by high unemployment rates – which in turn may become a threat to social cohesion and stability in society.”   Finally, he stressed that it is crucial to pay closer attention to the situation of women.   “Domestic violence, discrimination in the labour market, and poor political and managerial representations are some of the problems which prevent women from playing an equal role in our societies. This is shameful and inexcusable and has lasted for too long.”   * Access the e annual report via the link below Visit the related web page
	Poverty & Inequality by Thomas Pogge RSA Journal   Apr 2011   Despite abundant rhetorical commitment to the ideal of a fair global economic order, the world has actually moved in the opposite direction. To reverse the growing income gap between rich and poor, development aid must be accompanied by institutional reform, writes Thomas Pogge.   Fairness of an economic system can be defined by two requirements. First, people must have minimally adequate starting positions, so that they can effectively participate. In our time, this requirement is unmet for people who lack basic literacy and numeracy or live from childhood on with undernutrition or endemic malaria. Such conditions pre-empt their capacity to explore and evaluate their options for buying and selling, borrowing or employment. Second, those at the bottom must be able to share proportionately in economic growth. This requirement is unmet, for instance, in a feudal system where the gap between the landowners and the landless widens relentlessly, no matter how much harder the latter may work.   Despite abundant rhetorical commitment to the ideal of a fair global economic order, the world has actually moved in the opposite direction. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, the number of chronically undernourished people steadily increased from the early 1990s before rising above a billion in 2009 for the first time in human history. Branko Milanovic reports that, in a mere 17 years of globalisation (1988 to 2005), the share of global household income going to the bottom quarter of the world’s population has fallen by a third (from 1.155 percent to 0.775 percent), with the gap between the average income of the top 5 percent and that of the bottom quarter widening from 186:1 to 299:1.   These bleak statistics disturb the rosy picture of valiant effort and partial success that well-paid economists are feeding to the media and public of affluent countries. But if we care about fairness, as opposed to the mere appearance of it, then we must be willing to face the facts, as well as to look more closely at how that inaccurate narrative is produced. We must examine the World Bank’s unsound purchasing power adjustments, which count a person as non-poor even though his or her entire income can buy only as much daily food as could be bought in the US for 83 cents. We must recognise the mendacity of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) effort, which is illustrated by tracing the emergence of the first and most prominent MDG: the promise to halve extreme poverty by 2015.   The first version of this promise was made in the 1996 Rome Declaration on World Food Security. It commits us to halve the number of undernourished people between 1996 and 2015. The second version of the promise was made by the UN General Assembly in its 2000 Millennium Declaration. It commits us to halve, between 2000 and 2015, “the proportion of the world’s people whose income is less than one dollar a day and the proportion of people who suffer from hunger”. The third version of the promise, supposedly based on the Millennium Declaration, is the official formulation of MDG-1 now used to track progress. It commits us to halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of extremely poor people among the population of the developing countries.   Concealed by an unchanged catchphrase (“halve extreme poverty by 2015”), the revisions cleverly dilute the promise. By basing the target on a proportion rather than a number, the later versions take advantage of population growth. This advantage is magnified by relating the number of poor to the faster-growing “population of the developing countries” rather than to “the world’s people”, and it is magnified again by the decision to backdate the baseline to 1990: if the population of the developing countries grows until 2015 as expected, to 146 percent of what it was in 1990, then the number of poor only needs to fall to 73 percent of what it was in order to "halve poverty". This is obviously much less ambitious than reducing the number of poor to 50 percent of what it was. The backdating to 1990 brings the further advantage that spectacular poverty reductions in China during the 1990s can now be counted toward the Millennium Development Goals.   Using the latest World Bank data on the evolution of extreme poverty and the latest UN statistics on population growth, the graphic above displays the significance of the reformulations. The dilutions have added 484 million to the number of people whose extreme poverty in 2015 will be deemed morally acceptable, or even celebrated as success. Yet an extra 484 million people in extreme poverty equates to about six million additional premature deaths from poverty-related causes each year.   Even more remarkable than the thoughtfulness expended on these deceitful reformulations is the fact that, despite their high visibility, they drew no protests or even comments from any of the politicians, bureaucrats and experts (including those from less developed countries) who are supposedly engaged in the fight against poverty. None of them was willing to put his or her career at risk in order to try to protect the poor by holding the global elite to their earlier promises.   The story of the past 20 years is not that, through deception, the global elite did less than it ought to lift people out of poverty. Had the poorest quarter of humanity merely kept up with the growth in the global average income, had they merely maintained their wretched 1.155 percent share of global household income, they would have had 49 percent more in 2005 than they actually had. While this would still have been a less than fair basis for participation in the world economy, it would nonetheless have been a huge improvement on their actual condition. The real story of the past 20 years is that, despite all the rhetoric and despite good and successful efforts by many NGOs and development agencies, the world’s poor have been slaughtered. If we don’t understand how this happened, we won’t be able to do better in the post-MDG era.   What went wrong?   If acknowledged at all, the massive persistence of extreme poverty is usually explained by two factors: corrupt and oppressive regimes in many poor countries, and the ‘leaky bucket’ of development assistance. Both these explanations have an element of truth. But the first fails to explain the high prevalence of corrupt and oppressive regimes, and the second why the income share of the poor is falling, and rapidly so.   My own explanation redeploys the metaphor: the assets of the poor are like a leaky bucket, continuously depleted by massive outflows that overwhelm the effects of development assistance, which, in any case, are puny. We take great pride in our assistance, boasting of the roughly $15bn that OECD countries spend annually on basic social services in poor countries. Yet we ignore the vastly larger amounts that we extract from the poor without compensation. Let me count the ways.   First, affluent countries and their firms buy huge quantities of natural resources from the rulers of developing countries without regard for how such leaders came to – and how they exercise – power. In many cases, this amounts to collaboration in the theft of these resources from their owners: the country’s people. It also enriches their oppressors and thereby entrenches the oppression: tyrants sell us the natural resources of their victims and then use the proceeds to buy the weapons they need to keep themselves in power.   Second, affluent countries and their banks lend money to such rulers and compel the country’s people to repay it even after the ruler is gone. Many poor populations are still repaying debts incurred, against their will, by dictators such as Suharto in Indonesia, Mobutu in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Abacha in Nigeria. Again, we are participating in theft: the unilateral imposition of debt burdens on impoverished populations.   Third, affluent countries facilitate the embezzlement of funds by public officials in less developed countries by allowing their banks to accept such funds. This complicity could easily be avoided: banks are already under strict reporting requirements with regard to funds suspected of being related to terrorism or drug trafficking. Yet banks still accept and manage embezzled funds, with governments ensuring that their banks remain attractive for such illicit deposits. Global Financial Integrity (GFI) estimates that less developed countries have annually lost at least $342bn in this way during the 2000–08 period.   Fourth, affluent countries facilitate tax evasion in the less developed countries through lax accounting standards for multinational corporations. Since they are not required to do country-by-country reporting, such corporations can easily manipulate transfer prices among their subsidiaries to concentrate their profits where they are taxed the least. As a result, they may report no profit in the countries in which they extract, manufacture or sell goods or services, having their worldwide profits taxed instead in some haven where they only have a paper presence. GFI estimates that, during the 2002–06 period, trade mispricing has deprived less developed countries of $98.4bn per annum in tax revenues.   Fifth, affluent countries account for a disproportionate share of planetary pollution. Their emissions are prime contributors to serious health hazards, extreme weather events, rising sea levels and climate change, to which poor populations are especially vulnerable. A recent report by the Global Humanitarian Forum, led by Kofi Annan, estimates that climate change already seriously affects 300 million people and causes $125bn worth of economic losses every year. It also causes 300,000 deaths, of which 99 percent are in less developed countries.   Finally, affluent countries have created a global trading regime that is supposed to release large collective gains through free and open markets. The regime is rigged, however, by allowing rich states to continue to protect their markets through tariffs and anti-dumping duties and to gain larger world market shares through export credits and subsidies (including about $300bn annually in agriculture) that poor countries cannot afford to match. Since production is much more labour-intensive in poor than in affluent countries, such protectionist measures destroy many more jobs than they create.   Taken together, these factors generate a massive headwind against the poor. This overwhelms the effects of public and private foreign aid, meaning that the poor remain excluded from effective participation in the globalised economy and cannot benefit proportionately from global economic growth.   This problem may be solvable through increases in development aid, but it is far better to develop institutional reforms that would reduce the headwind, and eventually turn it off. This would mean seeing the world poverty problem not as a specialist concern at the margins of politics but as an important consideration in all decisions related to institutional design.   Currently, the richest 15 percent of world citizens have an 81.66 percent share of global household income. The question is, are they prepared to accept a slightly smaller share so that the bottom half of humanity can have an extra percentage point or two beyond their current 2.91 percent? If so, let’s make sure our politicians know.   * Thomas Pogge is professor of philosophy and international affairs at Yale University. Visit the link below to access the complete essay.   http://www.thersa.org/events/video/vision-videos/ending-poverty Visit the related web page
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