Social Systems of Perennial Human Rights Abuses

Despite historical evidence—and inspired by the values embedded in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)—some non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and certain United Nations agencies have set the “eradication of poverty” as an achievable goal. Nearly three-quarters of a century after the world community adopted the UDHR, not only has poverty not been eradicated, but more people have been pushed deeper into conditions below the poverty line. Today, nearly a billion people live in destitution. This category refers to the deplorable conditions in which human beings live every day without secure access to food, water, and shelter. These are individuals who cannot work and depend on aid for survival—the growing population of unhoused, unfed, and often forgotten human beings.

This condition represents a state even worse than poverty—where people have jobs and work daily, yet still fail to secure basic needs for themselves and those under their care. These are the working poor. Often, those struggling with poverty are only a month away from falling into full destitution.

As inhumane as poverty and destitution are, they are even worse when specific social groups are permanently locked into these conditions due to formal and informal, determinant and contributory systems in their societies. Worse still is when these conditions exist in so-called democratic societies, where doctrines of sovereignty and the rule of law become state instruments to preserve the very systems that create such atrocities.

For instance, in the United States—ostensibly the most affluent and powerful nation-state in the world, the leader of the “free world”—more than 771,480 people experienced homelessness in January 2024, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). In China, the second-largest economy globally, 300 million people are homeless out of a population of 1.4 billion. In India, now the most populous country and a rising economic power, approximately 93 million people were unhoused according to the 2011 Census of India. The issue is not confined to developing or populous nations; it is also alarmingly present in the developed world. Data from European countries show that a significant percentage of their populations are housed on an emergency basis, highlighting how precariously close many are to homelessness. In the UK, an economic powerhouse, there are over 40 homeless individuals per 10,000 residents.

Global data confirms the widespread nature of these conditions, revealing a strong correlation between dominant social and economic systems and poverty as an outcome. According to 2024 data from the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat), between 1.6 billion and 3 billion people around the world lack access to decent housing. In 2022, more than 1.1 billion people lived in slums and unauthorized settlements—an increase of approximately 130 million since 2015.

The Institute of Global Homelessness estimates that at least 330 million people face absolute homelessness, defined as lacking any form of shelter. In 2024, over 60% of those experiencing homelessness were men, while around 30% were women. According to the Ruff Institute of Global Homelessness, official government statistics on homelessness are available in only 78 of 195 countries. Since 2018, just 57 nations have released official data on homelessness. The lack of data, combined with the trends in nation-states that released reliable data, suggest that poverty and destitution are widespread and are likely to be impacting more people than reported.

Western liberal thinkers and political leaders have long insisted that free-market economic systems and democracy are the keys to eradicating poverty and solving social problems. Yet, this worldview has only succeeded in generating unprecedented wealth for a tiny minority: 2,781 billionaires with a combined net worth of $14.2 trillion, and approximately 58 million millionaires—around 1.5% of the global adult population—amidst 8 billion people, many of whom struggle daily to make a living. The unproven link between democracy and prosperity enables the persistence of inhumane conditions in places like India and the West. Commentators often blame poverty on corruption and authoritarianism but rarely acknowledge how, in the world’s largest democracy and where free market capitalism is practiced, India, poverty is perpetuated through state and social institutions that remain unchallenged—and even normalized—by democratic systems.

Poverty is a persistent outcome of inequality. Modern systems claim to value equality, yet democracy often legitimizes inequality. The true abuse of human rights and dignity lies in creating and preserving systems that trap specific social groups into poverty. One illustrative example is the caste system: in such communities, individuals can be locked into poverty and destitution not only for life but for generations—regardless of how hard they work to improve their situation. Work, which should empower individuals to ameliorate their living standards, becomes secondary or even irrelevant when overshadowed by entrenched systems designed to keep people in a predetermined social position indefinitely. That—not poverty alone—is the most atrocious form of human rights abuse: a system that prevents individuals from benefiting from their own hard work simply because dominant social structures have created mechanisms that override merit, perseverance, and effort.