The Unheard Truth: Poverty and Human Rights

In our rapidly globalizing age with economic growth occurring in almost every corner of the world, it is easy to forget that more than one billion people still live on less than one dollar a day. Poverty is the worst human-rights crisis in the world today, denying billions of people their most basic rights. In a bracing argument enriched by compelling photographs from across the world, Amnesty International Secretary General Irene Khan makes the case that poverty remains a global epidemic because we continue to define it as an economic problem whose only solution is foreign aid and investment. Khan calls for a reevaluation of this longstanding assumption and turns us toward confronting poverty as a human-rights violation. Empowering the poor with basic rights of security is our only chance for eradicating poverty and giving freedom and dignity to those who have never experienced it.

"Important, potentially transformative ideas are nearly lost in this noble but botched treatise by Khan, secretary general of Amnesty International. Describing poverty as 'the world's worst human rights crisis,' the author refutes the view that economic growth alone can address the problem, arguing that corruption, disenfranchisement and other ills perpetuate poverty even as a country's GDP rises. Shifting her focus to the United Nations, she reveals how the organization's antiquated human rights and antipoverty approaches — still heavily influenced by cold war ideological battles — impede the causes they are intended to assist. Unfortunately, readers must wade through the book's tedious first half to reach these insights; Khan squanders space and her audience's patience reporting truisms like poor people often have 'inadequate' shelter, that they 'lack food and often go to bed hungry' and that war and genocide impoverish their victims. Not only do these unnecessary sections obscure Khan's very valuable messages, but they read more like a textbook than the work of a leading expert in her field. Photos." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

A powerful argument by the secretary general of Amnesty International that poverty is not just an economic problem but a global human-rights violation.

Irene Khan, as the first woman and first Asian secretary general of Amnesty International, has brought a strong focus to socioeconomic rights and violence against women around the world. She lives with her husband and daughter in London.