Destitution

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 […]