LONDON (AlertNet) - Governments must be held to account not just for human rights abuses such as killings or torture, but also for denying their citizens the rights needed to lift themselves out of poverty or improve access to health and education, Amnesty International said on Thursday.
Up to 1.4 billion people around the world are thought to be living below the extreme poverty line of $1.25 a day, the rights group said as it released its annual report titled "The State of the World's Human Rights".
"Rights to food, education, health and housing are out of their reach, and they cannot claim them due to the non-existent, corrupt or discriminatory justice systems," Amnesty's interim secretary-general Claudio Cordone wrote in the report.
"This is shown by mass forced evictions of people from their homes, whether in African countries such as Angola, Ghana, Kenya and Nigeria, or the Roma in European countries such as Bulgaria, Greece, Italy, Romania and Serbia. The result: the poor are driven deeper into poverty."
Adding its voice to concerns about the ability of countries to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) that were drawn up in 2000 by 189 heads of state, Amnesty said governments were falling far short of the targets and that new thinking was needed.
It said to stand a better chance of meeting the targets for eradicating extreme poverty and hunger; promoting gender equality and empowering women; reducing child mortality; improving maternal health; combating HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases and providing access to affordable essential medicines, the targets should be based on legal commitments governments have made to meet basic human rights.
"When it comes to the Millennium Development Goals we see that the rights that are embedded in those goals are still not really enforceable," Cordone told AlertNet in an interview.
"So, for example, you cannot go to court in most parts of the world to say 'I've been kicked out of my house, I've been evicted wrongfully, I need compensation'."
Another example Cordone gave of people being denied justice, was Sierra Leone where women are often forced to pay bribes in order to receive healthcare that would otherwise be free for pregnant and breastfeeding women.
"Discrimination against women is one of the things that leads to women being particularly disadvantaged by the economic crisis. If you really want to deal with maternal mortality, it's not just a matter of quality of care or resources, you have to end discrimination against women. The same thing with education," he said.
Maternal mortality is responsible for the death of an estimated 50,000 women worldwide every year, equivalent to the death of a woman every 90 seconds, Amnesty said.
It said its work in Peru, Burkina Faso, Sierra Leone and the United States showed that women died needlessly, primarily because of discrimination and violation of sexual and reproductive rights.
"States must take steps like ending child marriage, decriminalisng abortion, ensuring access to education and
addressing sexual violence," the group said.
For a factbox about key points from Amnesty's annual report click here.
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