Poverty is a matter of human rights, said a panel of experts at United Nations Headquarters in New York. The discussion, titled "Beyond Charity: Rights, Power and Poverty", held on 8 December 2006, was one of a series of events that marked the annual Human Rights Day celebration on 10 December. Sparked by a year of intense debate over the causes and solutions of poverty, the week-long events, held both inside and outside the UN, represented a significantly diverse range of voices.

Over the past year, debates over the merits of foreign aid have at times risen to the surface of public interest. In bookstores, "The End of Poverty", written by Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs-which called for increased development assistance to poor countries-and the opposing "White Man's Burden", by William Easterly of New York University, faced off in the early months of 2006. Op-eds on the issue waxed and waned. But while much of the mainstream is looking seriously at the issue of foreign aid for the first time, the development community has been engaged in it for generations. Over time, the concept of aid has largely evolved from one of charity to one of international solidarity, the event's panelists said. But even this notion has its divisions, as UN agencies and other development experts struggle to find ways to tackle the massive issue of poverty.

Under the United Nations umbrella, one prevalent opinion is that of poverty as a human rights problem. "Poverty is about power-who wields it, and who does not", said the panel's moderator, Craig Mokhiber of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), which hosted the panel. The agency made a clear statement on its position regarding aid through the Human Rights Day 2006 theme, "Fighting Poverty: A Matter of Obligation, Not Charity".

"Development without attending to the rights dimension of poverty is insufficient", Alicia Ely Yamin, Director of Research and Investigations for the group Physicians for Human Rights, said. Fellow panelist Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, former Director of the UN Human Development Report, noted that the idea of obligation is what sets the human rights approach apart from other development frameworks. The human rights approach sees citizens as "rights-holders" and States as "duty-bearers", she said, a logic that implicates States as human rights violators when conditions of severe poverty exist.

"Wherever we have extreme poverty, we can be close to certain that Governments are not fulfilling their obligations", agreed panelist Philip Alston, Director of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at New York University. The point of a human rights framework is to hold States firmly accountable for the condition of their citizens' lives. "If you can't look at poverty and say 'there is a violation of rights', you're not going to be able to mobilize governments and other actors to do much about it", he said.

OHCHR and other human rights advocates have long been at odds with other UN agencies, which take a more traditional stand on aid. Panelists were quick to note that the United Nations' most visible anti-poverty campaign, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which seek to eradicate extreme poverty by the year 2015, lack a clear focus on human rights. The eight MDG targets should not be interpreted as set of charity goals, said Ms. Fukuda-Parr. "The MDGs are nothing but numerical targets", she said, adding that they easily incorporate a human rights point of view if UN agencies strove to work together.

Outside the United Nations, debates continue on whether development assistance serves any purpose at all. At Columbia University's School for International and Public Affairs, students heard from business and economics Professor William Duggan on 7 December on the subject of poverty in Africa. Development and aid alone, he said, are not capable of revitalizing the developing world. Speaking on the example of the African continent as a whole, Mr. Duggan said that aid "has not worked".
"No country has ever achieved economic prosperity except through a thriving private sector", he said. In his view and in the opinion of anti-development advocates like William Easterly, aid should come a distant second to private enterprise in the fight against poverty. Mr. Duggan believes that private business, and perhaps investments by industrialized countries in those businesses, will lead the way in successful and sustainable reductions in poverty. While admitting that he knew of no solid way to implement a private business revolution in the developing world, he stressed the need to find an answer to this equation. "It is not democracy that leads to entrepreneurship, it is quite the opposite."

With so many varied debates circling the issue of poverty, reaching a consensus is likely a long way off. Still, whether it is manifested in skeptical opinions, in new development frameworks or in targets like the MDGs, the goal of the international community remains one and the same: to eradicate poverty.