MB Civic

Rich should fight poverty, cut military, subsidies: Canadian UN rights chief GENEVA (AP) – Indifference and narrow-mindedness from rich countries has hindered efforts to fight poverty around the world, the United Nations’ top human rights official said Sunday.

Louise Arbour, the Canadian UN high commissioner for human rights, said developed countries needed to do more for impoverished people in the developing world, perhaps by cutting back on the billions they spend on military expenses and government handouts to farmers.

Otherwise, the United Nations might fail to reach its goal set out at the beginning of the decade to cut poverty in half by 2015. Rich countries, under the guidelines, are supposed to increase their development aid to 0.7 per cent of their gross domestic product, she said.

“Many rich countries have yet to meet development-assistance targets they have accepted, yet they continue to spend 10 times more on military budgets,” Arbour said in a statement to commemorate the global body’s signing 58 years ago of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Rich countries, Arbour said, spend almost four times more on agricultural subsidies than on development assistance to poorer countries. She said the farm handouts combined to “an amount almost equal to the total gross national product of African countries.”

Poverty, she said, must be treated as “a matter of justice and human rights” that every country has a duty to address, regardless of its resources.

She said related issues – such as discrimination, how resources are distributed and corruption – also needed to be tackled if the world was to successfully fight poverty.

Arbour’s statement for this year’s “Human Rights Day” was less controversial than in 2005, when she warned the global ban on torture was becoming a casualty of the “war on terror,” singling out U.S. practices of sending terrorist suspects to other countries and holding prisoners in secret detention.

Her comments at the global body’s headquarters in New York City provoked an immediate rebuke from U.S. Ambassador John Bolton, who said it was “inappropriate and illegitimate for an international civil servant to second-guess the conduct that we’re engaged in the war on terror, with nothing more as evidence than what she reads in the newspapers.”