Protection from poverty in the European Court of Human Rights

This paper analyses the practice of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), which gives judicial protection to minimum socio-economic guarantees indispensable for freedom from poverty while addressing civil and political rights enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). I explore the normative basis, scope, strategies, conditions and effectiveness of the ECtHR’s enforcement of basic socio-economic guarantees, such as access to adequate food, water, sanitation, housing, clothing, health, and social security. The paper examines the virtues and shortcomings of the ECtHR’s approach and discusses legal and political measures necessary to improve judicial protection of the poor in Europe. It shows the necessity of the elaboration of a systematic legal conception clarifying the content and scope of socio-economic guarantees of freedom from poverty protected by the ECHR as well as common standards of their judicial enforcement. At the same time, I advocate for the direct judicial protection of socio-economic rights at the European level. An essential political measure in this sense would be the expansion of the Court’s jurisdiction to the rights enshrined in the European Social Charter and the Revised European Social Charter.

Unravelling the complexities of poverty in Northern Ireland, a new immigration destination

This chapter uses migrants’ experiences of poverty in Northern Ireland to consider the way in which poverty is experienced across transnational boundaries. The research draws from empirical data from Northern Ireland, a place which until relatively recently experienced little in-migration. It begins by considering the meaning of poverty and how it is understood transnationally i.e. across national boundaries. The chapter proceeds by showing how migrants shift their framing of poverty according to different circumstances. Poverty is also shown to bring with it physical and emotional vulnerabilities and can cause anxiety, indignity and insecurity for the individuals involved. Finally, the chapter highlights the importance of third party support from the sending or receiving society for overcoming the consequences of poverty.

Conclusion: responding to the dark reality of absolute poverty in European welfare states

This chapter states that the hegemonic European relative poverty paradigm necessitates a complementary approach that sheds light on overlooked or neglected individuals and groups in absolute poverty in Europe. It concludes over the lessons learned by preparing ground for such a paradigmatic correlate with an approach that resists the temptation to propose a concise but again necessarily excluding conceptual framework but tries to open leeway for different scholarly debates, disciplinary perspectives and conceptual and practical approaches to why might be termed absolute poverty in Europe. This chapter closes with six perspectives on the way forward to an enhanced and more nuanced scholarly perspective on absolute poverty in an area that understands itself as an anti-thesis to destitution and absolute poverty.

Justice and absolute poverty

The first part of this chapter distinguishes between three dimensions of justice, which can be used to measure the injustice of absolute poverty: recognition, distribution of resources and access to rights. In the second part the author argues that absolute poverty undermines all three dimensions of justice and does so to a larger degree than other forms of poverty. The author discusses the dependency on food banks as an example of absolute poverty.

Absolute poverty and social protection in the EU: a cross-national comparison

This chapter offers an empirical exploration of extreme poverty trends and patterns in the EU from a welfare regime perspective. Extreme poverty is operationalized as severe material deprivation, that is, the enforced inability to pay for a certain amount of goods and services. The empirical findings indicate that extreme poverty is low in the countries of the Social-democratic welfare regime and high in the countries of the South-European and the Liberal regime, whereas the countries of the Conservative-Corporatist welfare regime place themselves in-between.

High accompaniment needs: absolute poverty and vulnerable migrants

The chapter shows the challenge of migrants to Europe ending up in absolute poverty, especially if they are undocumented or illegal. The chapter makes three claims: (1) Migrants, especially those with low educational levels and traumatic biographies, are persons with high accompaniment needs – these needs are based on mental health challenges, challenges of cultural literacy and deskilling, and discriminatory practices; (2) without proper accompaniment migrants face a high risk of poverty including a risk of absolute poverty; (3) the organization and justification of accompaniment needs to be justified which has to happen on the basis of a firm commitment to human dignity. Nonetheless there are tough decisions that have to be made.

Back to the origins: early interpersonal trauma and the intergenerational transmission of violence within the context of urban poverty

This chapter explores the effects of exposure to violence during childhood in contexts of poverty, as well as some of the psychosocial mechanisms involved in the intergenerational transmission of violence. Essential processes of child-parent attachment in the early years are explored, as well as the disorganization of early attachment related to violence. Among the effects of early attachment disorganization are failures in emotion regulation, social agency, and mentalization, all of which tend to distort future parent-child relationships, thus exposing the next generation to violence. Principles and policies to promote resilience among children in contexts of poverty are discussed in the last section of the chapter.

Food poverty and the families the state has turned its back on: the case of the UK

Food poverty in the Global North is an urgent moral and social concern. In the UK, food banks have proliferated and the number of food parcels handed out to families has risen dramatically. In addition, welfare support has been increasingly withheld by successive UK governments as a tool for controlling immigration. Drawing on qualitative research from our study of food poverty, the chapter focuses on migrant families who are not entitled to social security benefits and are among those experiencing the most severe manifestations - going without food - in addition to psychological and social dimensions linked to precarité and social exclusion.

Measuring absolute poverty: shame is all you need

As a heuristic polemic, it is proposed that, while poverty is objective, multidimensional and inherently relative, it should be quantified using a single, absolute and subjective measure: namely, poverty-related shame. The concepts of poverty and absolute poverty is first interrogated before, following Amartya Sen, arguing that shame is an absolutely essential component of poverty and, moreover, that poverty-related shame offers a measure of poverty that is universal in the sense that it is evidenced in all countries irrespective of their level of economic development. Manifestations of poverty-related shame are then considered before exploring its potential value as a universal measure of poverty. Its universality is considered with respect to conceptual, functional, metric and political equivalence.

Measures of extreme poverty applied in the European Union

This chapter operationalises and tests out a number of possible measures of extreme poverty applied to the European Union countries, using the analysis of household survey data from EU- Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (SILC). It starts by reviewing developments in the conventional measurement of poverty in the EU. Then the concepts of absolute and extreme poverty are discussed. The bulk of the chapter presents the results of an analysis of the poverty rates, poverty gaps and poverty composition of five conceivable measures of extreme poverty. These are: The World Bank $ per day concept; poverty thresholds based on national minimum income schemes – social assistance; a threshold set on the basis of a minimal reference budget standard; a severe deprivation standard; and an overlaps measure based on severe deprivation and low income. The latter is the preferred option.