Voice for UN Convention on the Poor

Poverty and its impact are the major problems for humankind. Humanity fell to the ground here. To protect the rights of each people, Universal Declaration for Human Rights (UDHR) has been declared by the UN. Even after the UDHR declaration, we got more UN declarations for the rights of women, children, and people with disabilities, men at work, etc. Besides the UDHR these human rights documents have been declared for specific identity of the human context. Unfortunately, all the benefits of those declarations go or have been grabbed by the people of privileged status among them. It can be said that regardless of any other identity like women, men, other sex, a person with a disability, children, ethnicity, or minority, no significant number of poor people among those groups were able to come out from their prevailing inhuman context. It is clear that till now no UN Human Rights declaration can reach the poor people.

Yes, there are huge and long-term global initiatives to fight poverty by people, corporate, NGOs, religious organizations, states, the UN, etc. PRSP, MDG, and SDG are the recent global programs for the reduction of poverty. The Nobel lariat Professor Muhammed Yunus’s concept of microcredit and his recent initiative of Social business are very popular and are highly practiced in favor of the betterment of poor people. The world's richest person Mr. Bill Gates has donated billions of dollars to fight poverty; he also includes some world's richest persons in this philanthropy work. All these initiatives are charity-based! These all are charity initiatives because there is no legal obligation for the people in terms of specific rights that have been declared for poor people. The poverty reduction strategy doesn’t work now; Millennium Development Goal (MDG) completed its tenure in 2015; now Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) program is being carried out which has been targeted up to 2030. And the number 1 goal of SDG is ‘No Poverty’! Mr. Bill Gates declared that there will be no poor country after 2035. On the other hand, Dr. Muhammed Yunus, in a recent interview, expressed his anxiety or frustration that the way he is going, it will need a thousand years longer to reach his desire for poverty reduction.

Poverty is a historical phenomenon; it has thousands of years of legacy! It cannot be overcome through some 2/3 decade-long programs or any charity! In the history of human civilization, there was no society or place that was in favor of poor people. Poor people were just forced to shift their identity sometimes as a slave, sometimes as land slaves then independent peasants, industrial laborers, informal laborers, small duelers, landless, homeless, unemployed, moneyless, having no security of basic needs. Among the poor people, some are extremely poor, and some are relatively poor. These poor people are men, women, children, and persons with disability, other sex, multi-race & color, multi-ethnicity. Overall, they have a common identity which is they are poor. Carl Marx called them proletariat; Paulo Freire called these people oppressed, the World Bank called them poor people.

Why do people become poor, and remain poor? Is it made by God? Or it is the consequence of survival of the fittest? Is there any system approach of socio-economic and other cultural practices which is responsible for this? Or is it actually a pauperization/vaporization procedure? Who are and what is the root cause of poverty? These questions should be addressed and analyzed by civil society, states, international agencies, and the United Nations. Based on these analyses a UN charter on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against the poor should be promulgated to protect the rights of the poor people, which will open the bargaining opportunities for the poor to exercise their rights, reform the necessary arrangements and formulate the state policies and laws for them. And as members of the UN, states will ratify and adopt the proposed convention.

In Bangladesh, we have started discussions on a very small scale with interested persons on this proposed convention. We are planning to involve civil society NGOs and state policymakers in this movement. We need some formal platforms at the state, regional and international levels to create effective movements for this issue. This is a huge goal to materialize. We are seeking every kind of support from anywhere to move the proposition to its final goal.