Orange County civil rights and homeless advocates will meet with a United Nations investigator on Monday, Dec. 4, to present evidence that local governments’ treatment of homeless people constitutes a violation of international human rights.
The U.N. Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, is touring the United States for two weeks to research his upcoming report on extreme poverty in America. It will be partially based on his visits to Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Atlanta, Puerto Rico, West Virginia, and Montgomery, Ala.
Alston on Wednesday said that “great poverty and inequality” exist in America, despite the nation’s wealth. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has said that extreme poverty involves a lack of income, a lack of access to basic services and social exclusion. It also has said that poverty can cause human rights violations, when the poor are forced into unsafe and unhealthy conditions.
“I would like to focus on how poverty affects the civil and political rights of people living within the U.S., given the United States’ consistent emphasis on the importance it attaches to these rights in its foreign policy,” Alston, a native Australian who teaches law at New York University, said in a prepared statement.
Alston plans to release his report on American extreme poverty in spring 2018 and present it to the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva in June. This year, Alston has released reports on poverty in the nations of China, Saudi Arabia, and Mauritania.
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