A/HRC/19/32
explicit mention of poverty-reinforcing aspects of administrative processes. Furthermore,
several stakeholders called for a greater emphasis on human rights education as an antipoverty strategy, as well as to more explicit mention of the role of the media in producing
and combating social stigma. There were also recurrent calls for more significant treatment
of structural causes of extreme poverty; these included the global economic system and the
debt crisis, the conduct of transnational corporations, the status of the right to development,
and the global environment and climate change. Several parties also urged a more direct
approach to social security, as articulated in such concepts as essential social transfers or
social minimums. Recurrent mention was also made of the need to call on States to
implement fiscal policies aimed at raising the revenues necessary to implement the draft‟s
agenda. Stakeholders also broadly agreed on the desirability to make the draft guiding
principles‟ complementarity vis-à-vis other existing international instruments combating
(extreme) poverty more explicit,2 as well as on the importance to emphasize the role played
by non-State actors in combating extreme poverty. Finally, it was repeatedly suggested to
include a concrete and detailed implementation strategy for the draft guiding principles, so
as to underline their objective of being practical and practicable.
Points for clarification
4.
A few issues require further clarification: firstly, all stakeholders agreed with the
focus on women and children as the key categories cutting across all forms of exposure to
extreme poverty. Several parties proposed to mention further categories as being
particularly exposed, most notably those involving (old) age, disabilities, migration, refuge
and asylum, ethnic, racial or linguistic minority status, disease (in particular HIV/AIDS),
traditional social status (such as caste), location (especially for those in rural areas), and
descent, especially indigenous descent. Secondly, stakeholders pointed out that the nature
of the obligations mentioned in the draft guiding principles needed to be clarified and that a
line needed to be drawn between references to pre-existing legal obligations, on one hand,
and consensus-based principles and policies, on the other hand. Such clarification also
implied, thirdly, explicit statements on the justiciability of at least some of the obligations
mentioned in the draft guiding principles, in particular those related to recognized civil,
political, economic, social, and cultural rights. Fourthly, although most parties stated that
they thought the rights listed in the draft guiding principles were comprehensive in relation
to their objectives, there were, nonetheless, several suggestions for specific rights (issues)
to be included or highlighted. Several parties highlighted the right to food and to safe
drinking water and sanitation, as well as the importance of the right to privacy and to family
life. Furthermore, several civil and political rights were suggested for explicit mention,
among them the freedom of expression and of religion.
2
4
Instruments specifically mentioned were the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the
International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, the Guiding Principles on Human
Rights and Business, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)‟s Voluntary
Guidelines on Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land and Forests exercise, the International
Labour Organization‟s (ILO) Decent Work Agenda, the Global Compact, or OHCHR‟s own
Principles and Guidelines on a Human Rights Approach to Poverty Reduction Strategies.
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