Democrats urge Congress to take action on appalling rates of poverty

Ed Pilkington in New York
Tue 12 Jun 2018 14.52 EDT

Bernie Sanders and a group of top Democrats are calling on the Trump administration to present a plan to Congress to combat “massive levels of deprivation and the immense suffering this deprivation causes”, following an excoriating United Nations report into extreme poverty in America.

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The group specifically urges Trump to put the convention on the rights of the child before the Senate for ratification. The US is the only country in the world that has failed to ratify the treaty and the letter writers say “it is shameful that more than 13 million children live in poverty in this country and that, on any given night, more than one in five homeless individuals are children”.

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The congressional intervention comes in response to the official report of the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty, Philip Alston, who acts as global watchdog on the human rights implications of deprivation. Following a two-week tour of the US in December that took him to several of the most poverty-stricken parts of the country, he issued a scathing critique of the fact that 40 million Americans live in poverty and more than five million experience levels of absolute deprivation associated with the developing world.

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They lament the narrow definition of human rights adopted by the US over successive administrations. Quoting Alston, they say the US “is alone among developed countries in insisting that, while human rights are of fundamental importance, they do not include rights that guard against dying of hunger, dying from a lack of access to affordable healthcare or growing up in a context of total deprivation”.

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