A/HRC/7/15 page 9 34. Secondly, it enhances social consensus and acceptability, thereby enabling States and other social actors to accept the responsibility of adopting policies to eradicate extreme poverty. While it is desirable that society take care of all poor people in a country, it may be prudent to move step-by-step and begin by identifying a group of people recognized as extremely poor, so that appropriate policies can be formulated along with institutional mechanisms to alleviate their deplorable living conditions. A. Union v. Overlap 35. The total universe of the poor in a country is regarded as the aggregate or union of all three groups: those who are income poor, those who are deprived of human development and those who are socially excluded. Extreme poverty in such a case would be a portion of each of these categories selected in terms of the severity of the conditions of deprivation. 36. Since this number can be very large in many developing countries, a society may choose a set of criteria limiting the number of people suffering from extreme poverty to a smaller subset, i.e., an overlap of the three sets of people who are income poor, human-development poor and socially excluded. In other words, those suffering from all three categories of poverty, thereby, give a smaller number of people than implied in the union approach. The advantage of this approach is that the severity of the conditions of poverty would be apparent to every member of society. Following the Rawlsian principle of justice, which emphasizes the need to concentrate on the most vulnerable sections of society, it should therefore be possible to appeal to people’s sense of justice and persuade them to accept the obligations associated with the elimination of extreme poverty, which makes a small section of the population extremely vulnerable, suffering from the loss of all liberties or freedom of action. 37. At the 2007 expert consultation, the issue of public choice was discussed at length. While the independent expert’s approach by no means guaranteed that there would be no disagreement between social groups on what the relevant elements of extreme poverty were, most experts agreed that narrowing down the universe of the poor to the extremely poor would most likely achieve greater political acceptance. B. Importance of different dimensions 38. The independent expert clearly stated in his previous reports that the multidimensional definition of extreme poverty, as propounded by him, did not stand in contradiction to any of the earlier definitions of poverty. The most comprehensive definition used in human rights reports on extreme poverty was based on Father Joseph Wresinski’s concept of the “lack of basic security”, combining the French approach of social exclusion, in terms of lack of participation and rupture of social bonds, with other economic and social factors preventing the enjoyment of freedoms and human rights. This concept was also summarized by the first Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Extreme Poverty of the Sub-Commission, Leandro Despouy, when he stated that the lack of basic security connoted the absence of one or more factors enabling individuals and families to assume basic responsibilities and to enjoy fundamental rights (E/CN.4/Sub.2/1996/13, annex III). The factors that enable individuals and families to assume basic responsibilities directly refer to access to income and human development. But they also include features that relate to social exclusion, because basic responsibilities imply a social role linked to the enjoyment of rights that have to be recognized by society. Nothing would be lost if