The Special Rapporteur’s Philippe Alston most recent and last report on extreme poverty and human rights deserves reading: ‘Rather than resolving to address the inadequacy of their public health and social protection systems in response to the pandemic, many governments have seen COVID-19 as a passing challenge to be endured, ignoring the indispensability of large-scale economic and social restructuring. Others have taken it as an opportunity to undermine or restrict human rights. And rather than acknowledging how badly efforts to “end poverty” have been faring, and how relentlessly the pandemic has exposed that fact, most actors are doubling down on existing approaches that are clearly failing.’

It criticizes the World Bank statistics, promotes universal social protection, demands to update the SDGs and to find solutions for the debt and tax problems…

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