Where Needs Meet Rights

While the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says 'everyone has a right' to food, housing, livelihood and health, advocacy for human rights tends to emphasize people's civil and political rights rather than their economic and social rights. The poverty, violence and globalization which are depriving more and more people of these basic human entitlements calls for creative new approaches to economic and social rights which, the authors say, must be rooted in human needs, human dignity and legitimacy and underpinned by religious convictions. Such approaches will consider poverty and violence not merely as problems to be solved by economic development but as everyday realities for millions of people in the world -- realities which oblige their fellow human beings to act.