UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights

Appointed by the UN Human Rights Council, the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights works to elucidate the relationship between human rights and poverty. In each calendar year, the Special Rapporteur:

• Conducts two official country visits.
• Submits a thematic report to the Human Rights Council in June.
• Submits a thematic report to the General Assembly in October.
• Issues communications to State Governments in response to relevant information received from civil society on urgent and/or particularly important issues that might exacerbate conditions of poverty or threaten the human rights of the poor.

Through these specific outputs, the Special Rapporteur seeks to influence agenda-setting and policy-making at both the national and international levels, and give a higher profile to these issues through contributions to public debate, publications, and advocacy.

Thematic Areas

Since he was appointed in June 2014, Professor Alston has stressed the importance of relying on a human rights based approach when confronting extreme poverty. The Special Rapporteur has focused on the following thematic areas:

• Identifying inequality as one of the central challenges for the human rights system.
• Reconceptualizing the relationship between poverty and human rights.
• Treating economic and social rights as genuine human rights through the ‘Recognition, Institutionalization, Accountability’ (“RIA”) framework.
• Linking social rights advocacy to major international initiatives in the social justice and development spheres, such as the Social Protection Floor Initiative and Universal Basic Income.
• Integrating the human rights and development agendas through reports on the World Bank and Human Rights and the institutional responsibility of the UN for the cholera crisis in Haiti.

For a more complete archive of news and documents relating to Professor Alston’s period as mandate holder, visit the Center’s searchable Document Center and News Archive.

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