This is a powerful statement on the right to development, and on the duty of States in the international community to promote this right. Nor do all the duties fall on the international community. The Vienna Declaration also put the onus for achieving the right to development firmly on individual countries themselves, in part by calling for long-term work to put in place the infrastructure of a society capable of guaranteeing democracy and the rule of law. Poverty is a denial of human rights Poverty is a denial of human rights. For the 1.3 billion people, one-third of the population of the developing world, who live on less than a dollar a day, there can be little doubt that they are deprived in fundamental ways.
Poverty is brutal.
It is embedded in all realms of the existence of poor people, not only lack of income. Perhaps the most basic human right challenged by human poverty is the right to life. Nearly a third of the people in the least developed countries, most of them in Sub-Saharan Africa, cannot expect to live beyond forty. Another mark of poverty, adult illiteracy, means that the poor have severe restrictions on their access to knowledge, to information and to the press, as well as restrictions on other basic human rights such as political participation. Women are the hardest hit by human poverty.