A/HRC/32/31 social rights. Many hundreds of millions of people continue to suffer from extreme poverty, and by no means only in the poorest countries, in what is a grave affront to any notion of universal human rights. While such poverty is a phenomenon that fundamentally undermines most, if not all, civil and political rights, its most obvious and brutal manifestation is in the premature deaths and severely deprived lives that result from the denial of economic and social rights. While it is true that many developed and a few developing States have radically diminished extreme poverty without adopting a strategy based on the recognition of economic and social rights, experience more broadly suggests that the failure to take those rights seriously diminishes the prospects for eliminating extreme poverty, even in contexts where overall economic growth levels are high. 14. It is not just the world’s poorest citizens who are at risk. The capitalist system, which has become the dominant global economic system, is “a tremendously powerful system … in terms of sheer productivity, innovation and dynamism”, but it is ultimately unsustainable unless the excesses and predations that are built into the way it functions are tempered by systems that ensure the basic welfare of the many who would otherwise be victims of the “uncertainty, instability and anti-social effects generated by capitalist processes”.7 15. Economic and social rights are also of central importance to efforts to tackle extreme inequality and its consequences. The thoroughly documented increases in global wealth and income inequality threaten to undermine the social fabric, to turn civil and political rights into a tool that will be used predominantly to protect the rights and interests of the wealthy and to entrench forms of economic and political liberalism that ignore the needs and deny the rights of those living in poverty. In many respects, the approach currently taken by the international human rights system all but ensures the worst of all possible outcomes. On the one hand, the correct approach insists that economic and social rights are indivisible from, and of equal importance to, civil and political rights, thus suggesting that they can provide a meaningful response to extreme poverty, extreme inequality and other forms of rampant social injustice. On the other hand, the international human rights system systematically marginalizes those rights in many respects, and tolerates a situation in which the majority of States avoid the recognition, institutionalization and accountability that alone can establish solid foundations upon which to build respect for economic and social rights as full-fledged human rights and thus provide powerful and principled arguments to reduce levels of inequality. 16. More sustained and meaningful attention to economic and social rights is also increasingly recognized as an indispensable component of effective and comprehensive counter-terrorism strategies in many contexts. The Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights while countering terrorism has consistently drawn attention to the extent to which societies characterized by economic, social, political and educational exclusion are often breeding, or recruitment, grounds for terrorism.8 And the SecretaryGeneral included in his Plan of Action to Prevent Violent Extremism a lack of socioeconomic opportunities, as well as marginalization and discrimination, among the conditions conducive to violent extremism.9 17. A strong case is also to be made for attributing the resurgence of right-wing populism, at least in some of the many countries in which it is occurring, to the growth of inequality and the widespread neglect or denial of economic and social rights. 7 8 9 8 For a powerful argument to this effect, see David Garland, The Welfare State: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 137. See A/HRC/20/14, para. 31; also A/HRC/6/17, para. 64 See A/70/674, paras. 24-26.