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	Extreme poverty is a violation of human rights by Isabelle Pypaert Perrin ATD Fourth World France   Speech at the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie – Paris, France, 10 June 2016 by Isabelle Pypaert Perrin, Director General of ATD Fourth World, on the occasion of the sixth official meeting of the International Committee for October 17.   In 1957, Joseph Wresinski went to live alongside families whose homes were in the mud of a former rubbish dump in Noisy-le-Grand, France. In these families he saw the courage of his own family and especially of his mother, who faced humiliating situations yet fought for her children to grow up in freedom and dignity.   With these families, he developed projects that promoted family, social, and cultural values. Together they researched their history, and they found purpose and gained the strength to stand proudly as men and women who have something unique to offer the world.   They were joined by people of different backgrounds who were seeking to create new relationships based on equality, dignity, and a refusal to leave anyone aside, and they founded ATD Fourth World.   On 17 October 1987, over 100,000 defenders of human rights from all over the world gathered on the human rights plaza of the Trocadero in Paris.   They stood there with Joseph Wresinski as he declared that extreme poverty is a violation of human rights, and they unveiled a commemorative stone calling for poverty to be abolished.   Today their voices continue to rise from areas of extreme poverty. They tell the world of the strength of people who resist poverty, who gather together and invite everyone to join and strengthen this movement that carries the hope of a world without poverty.   In 1992, the United Nations declared 17 October the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty; and in 2006 the Secretary-General of the United Nations acknowledged the powerful spirit of this day and asserted that people who struggle against poverty day after day are the primary builders of a fairer and more fraternal society.   People who live in poverty, and who thus endure all kinds of violence, teach us the true meaning of peace. Every day they pay the price, most often in silence.   For example, Yvanite, from Haiti, declined to press charges against a neighbour who had wronged her because she saw that this woman, like herself, was forced to struggle alone, without any resources, to bring up her children.   Every day people in poverty try to live in solidarity and friendship, but their efforts are mostly unseen or misunderstood.   Michel in Belgium is another example. He spends his days and nights meeting people who are forced to live in the streets. He grew up in institutions and spent time on the streets himself; and now, because he welcomes people without homes into his own home, he gets complaints from neighbors and municipal authorities.   People in poverty need so much courage and intelligence each day to create peaceful solutions in the most difficult situations.   Another example: In a country devastated by civil war, young people confront bullets to bring books to children so that their intelligence will not be wasted. It makes us ask: when will these unexpected gestures of peace be recognized by a Nobel Peace Prize?   The year 2017 is right around the corner, and it’s up to us all to make it a new step on the path of liberation and peace.   News from around the world is troubling. It can drive us to look for more security for ourselves — at the price of more insecurity for others — or it can lead us to find new resources, new strength, new ideas, and new ways to live together.   We can find this with Mr. Parfait, who lives outside Bangui in the Central African Republic. Mr. Parfait works for hours on end under the sun, trying in vain to make ends meet. But even so, along with others, he always looks for ways to open a future for people even less fortunate than himself. Recently he told us, “What worries me is extreme poverty. We have no shortage of worries, but worries don’t lead to progress. For those of us who are working towards peace, we can’t stop there.”   Mr. Parfait, and those like him who resist poverty, invite us to join them in their action.   This is why ATD Fourth World and the International Committee for October 17 are preparing to launch a worldwide campaign to combat extreme poverty and create peace.   This campaign follows our policy initiative that contributed to the international community’s commitment to leave no one aside. It calls for us to get together and, by 2030, to eradicate poverty of all kinds everywhere.   For us it makes a lot of sense to speak about this campaign publicly for the first time here at this centre of La Francophonie [French-speaking communities], where member nations meet in a spirit of peace and human rights.   For 2017, we invite everyone to join this meeting between people who fight poverty and people who carry an ideal of justice and fellowship.   For 2017, through thousands of stories of courage and resistance, through concerts, songs, artistic creations, and films, through seminars and conferences, events and informal encounters between people who would never otherwise meet, we hope to show that when we come together, we can defeat poverty.   We are convinced that, through this campaign, young people around the world will find the inspiration, the strength, and the confidence to confront the challenges of today and to build the future of tomorrow.   ATD Fourth World’s written contribution to the UN High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF), a statement called “Leave No One Behind”states, in part:   “Fighting against stigmatization and discrimination is crucial in the commitment to further social progress and eradicate extreme poverty. Though there are many barriers to it, the participation of people living in poverty provides learning and regenerating processes for people and institutions that commit to them.   ATD Fourth World proposes the following areas that are crosscutting and particularly important to address together with people living in poverty, especially those who are the furthest behind: tackling climate change; ensuring social protection, quality education, and access to decent work for all; defining and measuring poverty with those furthest behind.   ATD also proposes that people affected by humanitarian crises, including the most vulnerable and those furthest behind, not only be informed and consulted, but put at the centre of decision-making processes to meaningfully influence humanitarian action.” Visit the related web page
	MSF to pull out of World Humanitarian Summit by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF)   May 2016 (MSF)   Last year, 75 hospitals managed or supported by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) were bombed. This was in violation of the most fundamental rules of war which gives protected status to medical facilities and its patients, regardless if the patients are civilians or wounded combatants. Beyond the hospitals, civilians are being wounded and killed by indiscriminate warfare in Syria, Yemen, South Sudan, Afghanistan and elsewhere. At the same time, the treatment of refugees and migrants in Europe and beyond has shown a shocking lack of humanity.   A humanitarian summit, at which states, UN agencies and non-governmental organisations come together to discuss these urgent issues, has never been more needed. So the World Humanitarian Summit (WHS) this month could have been a perfect opportunity.   MSF has been significantly engaged in the WHS process over the past 18 months, including preparing briefing notes on various themes – a sign of our willingness to be involved. The WHS has done an admirable job in opening up the humanitarian sector to a much wider group of actors, and leading an inclusive process.   However, with regret, we have come to the decision to pull out of the summit. We no longer have any hope that the WHS will address the weaknesses in humanitarian action and emergency response, particularly in conflict areas or epidemic situations. Instead, the WHS’s focus would seem to be an incorporation of humanitarian assistance into a broader development and resilience agenda.   Further, the summit neglects to reinforce the obligations of states to uphold and implement the humanitarian and refugee laws which they have signed up to.   As shocking violations of international humanitarian law and refugee rights continue on a daily basis, WHS participants will be pressed to a consensus on non-specific, good intentions to ‘uphold norms’ and ‘end needs’. The summit has become a fig-leaf of good intentions, allowing these systematic violations, by states above all, to be ignored.   Summit participants, whether states or UN agencies or non-governmental organisations, will be asked to declare new and ambitious “commitments”. But putting states on the same level as non-governmental organisations and UN agencies, which have no such powers or obligations, the Summit will minimise the responsibility of states. In addition, the non-binding nature of the commitments means that very few actors will sign up to any commitments they haven’t previously committed to.   We hoped that the WHS would advance these vital access and protection issues, reinforcing the role for independent and impartial humanitarian aid, and putting particular attention on the need to improve emergency response. Unfortunately it has failed to do so, instead focusing on its ambitions to “do aid differently” and “end need”, fine-sounding words which threaten to dissolve humanitarian assistance into wider development, peace-building and political agendas.   We can no longer see how the WHS will help the humanitarian sector to address the massive needs caused by continuing violence against patients and medical staff in Syria, Yemen and South Sudan; by civilians intent on fleeing being blocked at borders in Jordan, Turkey and Macedonia; by the inhumane treatment of refugees and migrants desperately trying to find safe haven in Greece and Australia; by the serious gaps we faced during the response to the Ebola epidemic, repeated again, albeit on a smaller scale, in the yellow fever epidemic in Angola today; by the serious restrictions placed by some states on humanitarian access, denying people basic services; and by the continuing lack of effective mobilisation to address recurring disease outbreaks in Democratic Republic of Congo.   In all of these situations, the responsibilities of states in their making, and the diminished capacity of the humanitarian system to respond causing yet more suffering and death, will go unaddressed. For these reasons, and with considerable disappointment, MSF has decided to pull out of the World Humanitarian Summit.   http://www.msf.org/en/news http://www.msf.org/en/article/msf-pull-out-world-humanitarian-summit http://www.worldhumanitariansummit.org/learn Visit the related web page
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