Living in dignity
“The teacher tells me off when I speak my language… Teachers do not even want to hear our songs,” a Romani school child in Croatia told AI. Extreme poverty, discrimination, segregation and abuse at school deny Romani children in their right to education in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Slovenia.
Everyone, everywhere has the right to live with dignity. That means that no-one should be denied their rights to adequate housing, food, water and sanitation, and to education and health care.
Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, including the right to food, the highest attainable standard of health and education, are as much human rights as are freedom of expression or the right to a fair trial. Nearly 60 years ago, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted recognising the principle that human rights are universal and indivisible - that all human rights should be enjoyed by all people. This is at the heart of Amnesty International's mission.
Amnesty International is increasingly documenting how human rights violations drive and deepen poverty. People living in poverty have the least access to power to shape the policies of poverty and are frequently denied effective remedies for violations of their rights.
AI is working to hold governments, big business and other powerful actors to account for human rights violations which target the poor, and which deepen poverty.
AI campaigned to combat the epidemic of forced evictions across Africa in 2006. In countries such as Angola, Equatorial Guinea, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Sudan and Zimbabwe, forced evictions are carried out unlawfully, with excessive and sometimes lethal force, and without provision of adequate alternative accommodation, rendering hundreds of thousands of people homeless and vulnerable to further human rights abuses.
Forced evictions disproportionately affect people living in poverty and often lead to a wide range of other human rights being denied (See Africa: Forced evictions reach crisis levels, AI Index: AFR 01/009/2006).
In Peru, AI worked to ensure that the authorities respect the right of Indigenous and other marginalized women to receive information about health care that would reduce the high levels of maternal mortality (Peru. Poor and excluded women. Denial of the right to maternal and child health. AI Index: AMR 46/004/2006)
In Europe, together with other national and international human rights groups, Amnesty International denounced patterns of forced evictions against Roma, and denial of their right to adequate housing in Bulgaria, Greece, and Serbia and Montenegro (Kosovo). From July, Amnesty International campaigned for the relocation of around 530 Roma, Ashkali and Egyptian internally displaced people in Kosovo, including 138 young children, who were living in camps contaminated by lead from a disused smelting site and at serious risk to their health.
Amnesty International is preparing a global Campaign for Human Dignity. The campaign will address human rights violations which drive and deepen poverty. An outline of the campaign framework (PDF) was produced to encourage wide engagement as AI develops its vision for the campaign.