A/HRC/29/31
I. Introduction
1.
The present report is submitted in accordance with Human Rights Council resolution
26/3 and is the first report by Philip Alston submitted to the Human Rights Council in his
capacity as Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights.
2.
Poverty and wealth are often discussed as if they have very little to do with one
another. In the present report, the Special Rapporteur argues that extreme poverty is directly
related to extreme inequality, especially, but not only, in relation to wealth and income
distribution within countries. He also argues that international human rights law has much
to say about existing inequalities and how they can be reduced in order to eliminate extreme
poverty. To date, however, the debate over inequality, which has assumed a new vibrancy
in the wake of the publication of Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First
Century, has paid very little attention to the relevance of human rights and much of the
discussion that has taken place has been far more concerned with the plight of the middle
classes than of those living in extreme poverty.
3.
The international human rights community has largely reciprocated the economists’
neglect by ignoring the consequences of extreme inequality in the vast majority of its
advocacy and analytical work. It does so at its peril, however, since a human rights
framework that does not address extreme inequality as one of the drivers of extreme
poverty and as one of the reasons why over one quarter of humanity cannot properly enjoy
human rights is doomed to fail.
4.
The present report is not, therefore, about the ways in which extreme inequality can
be tackled. Many excellent analyses are now becoming available in that regard. 1 Nor does
the Special Rapporteur seek in this report to survey the range of recommendations that
emerges from those analyses. Rather, the goal is to provide answers to two general
questions. First, what has the international human rights regime done to address the
relationship between extreme poverty and extreme inequality? Second, what might be done
to improve the record in this regard?
II. Defining and measuring inequality
A.
Definition and recent figures
5.
Economic inequality can be used to refer to a range of inequalities relating to the
distribution of income (from labour or capital) or wealth (such as financial assets or land)
between individuals in a society. Economic inequalities are often expressed using the Gini
coefficient of inequality, which varies between 0 (expressing perfect equality) and 1
(expressing perfect inequality: for instance when one individual owns all the wealth in a
society), but there are a multitude of other ways to measure and present economic
inequalities.2 The magnitude of the problem of economic inequalities is dependent on what
exactly is being measured and how. An indicator measuring only labour income inequality
1
2
Anthony B. Atkinson, Inequality, What Can Be Done? (Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard
University Press, 2015); François Bourguignon, The Globalization of Inequality (Princeton, Princeton
University Press, 2015); Joseph Stiglitz, The Great Divide (New York, W.W. Norton and Company,
Inc., 2015).
See Social Panorama of Latin America (United Nations publication, Sales No. E.14.II.G.6), pp. 97–
100.
3