Summary

When the situation of people living in poverty is addressed in development or human rights frameworks, their civil and political rights are often completely ignored, explicitly excluded from the analysis or mentioned only in passing.

As a result, neither the diagnosis of situations nor the resulting policy recommendations are tailored to address the distinctive ways in which people living in poverty are affected by police brutality and sexual and gender-based violence, left unprotected and open to property theft, deprived of their liberty in pretrial detention, confined in their freedom of movement by the criminalisation of homelessness, or subjected to electoral fraud and manipulation, to mention just a few of the major violations.

The aim of this report is to show that:

1. the poor experience violations of civil and political rights both disproportionately and differently from others;
2. their civil and political rights are more or less systematically neglected by mainstream human rights and development actors;
3. the resulting situation crucially and very problematically undermines the principle of the indivisibility of all human rights; and
4. both the human rights and the development communities need to make far-reaching changes in order to ensure that respect for and promotion of all of the human rights of those living in poverty are incorporated into their analytical frameworks, the methodologies they use and the programmes and policies they recommend.