Human rights cities responding to poverty and inequalities

CHO Munyoung [Professor, Department of Cultural Anthropology, Yonsei University]

It is quite difficult to give a short answer to a grave question ‘how poverty and social inequalities impact on the human rights of residents at local level’. There is one thing that I would like to suggest here. Poverty and social inequalities tend to make people fail to recognize the rights of the poor or even feel numbed about the rights. Also, they encourage negative responses over the rights among people. When we search the term poverty on searching engines, then, the first images that pop up are naked and bony children living in Africa. 

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The term ‘human rights’ could gain vitality itself only when the government concentrates its administrative sources to public housing, public healthcare, public education, when citizens take those movement for granted, when we stop calling the poor ‘the vulnerable’ whom we have to protect, when coming to terms with an uncomfortable fact that our convenience and desire make poverty sustained.