NYU Law Professor Philip Alston draws on his decades-long experience in human rights, and explains why poverty is extremely political. We hear his views on the limitations of UN Sustainable Development Goals, and why technocratic economists are not the only experts we need to rely on, especially after COVID-19.  

This podcast episode features Alston’s take on how multilateral organizations should evolve, why climate change needs a bolder approach, and why the eradication of poverty  is not a priority of the elite power within global institutions. 

We end discussing Professor Alston’s adventures in a remote village in Papua New Guinea.

Guest Speaker:

Philip G. Alston’s teaching focuses primarily on international law, human rights law, and international criminal law. He co-chairs the NYU Center for Human Rights and Global Justice. In the human rights area, Alston was appointed in 2014 as the UN Human Rights Council’s Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights and has visited and reported on Chile, China, Mauritania, Romania, and Saudi Arabia. He was previously UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions from 2004 to 2010 and undertook fact-finding missions to: Sri Lanka, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Philippines, Israel, Lebanon, Albania, Kenya, Brazil, Central African Republic, Afghanistan, the United States, Albania, and Ecuador.

Photo Credit: Philip Alston, United Nations special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights. Photo by: Cia Pak / U.N.

As the UN’s poverty and human rights expert Philip Alston famously spoke truth to governments about what he saw. We explore what kind of world we’re heading into in the wake of coronavirus, and what Philip learnt listening to communities in countries from the USA to Ghana to Chile to Malaysia (some fascinating stories here!).

EQUALS is all about bringing a range of experts to share their own unique and insight from their own experiences. Professor Philip Alston was appointed to be the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, an independent expert role that he held from 2014 until April 2020.

We discuss the interplay between coronavirus and inequality, and if there is anything good that can possibly come out of this pandemic for a more equal world. We also dig deeper into the pressures of holding such a prominent UN role, and about the relationship between human rights and inequality.

This is the latest part of the EQUALS #InequalityVirus mini-series. 

Do listen, subscribe and share it with your friends and family. And follow us on @equalshope on Twitter.

Hosted by Nadia Daar and Nabil Ahmed.

Professor Philip Alston accused the Trump administration of being driven by “contempt, and sometimes even hatred for the poor,” compared the UK’s post-GFC austerity welfare policies to Victorian workhouses, and warned the country’s poor faced lives that were “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” In return, he’s been accused of bias by the US, warned he’d be the subject of a formal complaint to the UN from the UK government, and seen his report blasted by a UK newspaper as an “insult to our national intelligence.” In this very special Policy Forum Pod, Alston talks about tackling climate change, Brexit and Boris Britain, and why the “gloves need to come off.”

Philip Alston is John Norton Pomeroy Professor of Law at New York University. He is currently UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights. In 2014, he was a member of the Security Council-established commission of inquiry on the Central African Republic. He previously served as Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, as well as Chairperson of the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. During the drafting of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, he was UNICEF’s Legal Adviser.

Sharon Bessell is Director of the Children’s Policy Centre at Crawford School, the ANU lead on the Individual Deprivation Measure Project, and Editor of Policy Forum’s Poverty: In Focus section.

Martyn Pearce is Editor of Policy Forum.

Show notes | The following were mentioned in this episode:

Four Corners: Murray-Darling Basin Plan Cash Splash

The role of the private sector in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals

World Economic Forum Global Risks Report 2019

Global Dialogue on Trade

UN Global Compact

Private Participation in Infrastructure database

Democracy under threat in Nauru

Podcast: Fixing the NDIS

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Sustainable Development Goal 1 is to eliminate poverty in all its forms everywhere. Poverty stands in the way of people enjoying many of their basic human rights and it can also be the product of violations of certain rights, like the right to education. Tackling global poverty requires bridging questions of human rights law and economic development. In this episode Prof Philip Alston (UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights) talks about the challenges of using both human rights law and economic development agendas to address poverty.

This episode is part of a special series on “Working Together: Human Rights and the Sustainable Development Goals,” a British Academy project led by Professor Sandy Fredman, Fellow of the British Academy and Director of the Oxford Human Rights Hub. As part of this project, the Academy convened a roundtable in January 2018 with academic experts, policymakers and practitioners from the UK and overseas to discuss the ways in which human rights and developmental goals can work together to achieve the SDG agenda and particularly gender equality and women’s empowerment.

Interview with: Philip Alston (New York University)
Produced by: Kira Allmann (University of Oxford)
Music by: Rosemary Allmann

Is extreme poverty merely evidence of failed economic policy or should it also be seen as a breach of human rights? Legal scholar and UN Special Rapporteur Philip Alston argues that the conversation around human rights has yet to take seriously how the world's very poor are excluded from a life of dignity -- underpinned by access to education, basic health care and housing -- while extreme inequality is itself in part sustained by the blocking of civil and political rights by elites. Presented by Peter Mares.

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