Zhan Zhongle & Su Yu
China

During the process of human rights protection worldwide, poverty is increasingly attracting attentions from the international community. Whether the right of getting out of poverty can be regarded as a basic human right is still undetermined , at least it has become an unavoidable focus in the human rights area. In the article, I plan to discuss the significance of poverty eradication to human rights protection, review the efforts and achievements China has made in this regard and analyze, examine and introspect the existing problems.

I. Poverty eradication: an important undertaking for human rights protection

Poverty eradication is an important undertaking in the area of human rights protection, which has already been recognized by the world community. However, important divergences still exist regarding the connotation of "poverty". Some scholars point out that though we do not want to admit, all the legal studies on poverty make clear at the very beginning that "there is no legal definition of poverty" (though we can define poverty line) . Pierre sane pointed out straightly the essence of the issue: When we can define poverty in relative dimension, poverty is uncertain and unsolvable; the well-known standards for decency keep changing . Except for the definition of abject poverty which may threat people's basic existence, there are important divergences on the definition of "relative poverty". In general, we often use "poverty line" to roughly measure poverty. Currently, the world bank recommends to use absolute poverty line with a benchmark of $1.25 to measure purchasing power parities (PPP) of daily income ($1 was once used for the benchmark and is still in use in some places) and the median poverty line of $2. 

Before poverty eradication was officially set as an important goal of human rights protection, many international covenants and treaties established similar goals. Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights notes, "Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services." Section 1 of Article 11 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights stipulates: "The States Parties to the present Covenant recognize the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living for himself and his family, including adequate food, clothing and housing, and to the continuous improvement of living conditions. The States Parties will take appropriate steps to ensure the realization of this right, recognizing to this effect the essential importance of international cooperation based on free consent." Section 2 recognizes the fundamental right of everyone to be free from hunger. The recognition of all these rights and goals lays a basis for poverty eradication to have an importation position in the undertaking of human rights prevention.

Starting from mid-1960s, the world community clearly put forward actions focusing on poverty eradication in human rights area. The first international instrument that recognizes poverty eradication as the common goal for the world community formulated by the United Nations is Declaration on Social Progress and Development issued in 1969. Article 10 (c) of Part II "Objective" of the Declaration reads: "The elimination of poverty; the assurance of a steady improvement in levels of living and of a just and equitable distribution of income." Vienna Declaration and Program of Action issued in 1993 mentions the goals of eliminating extreme poverty (absolute poverty) or eliminating poverty.