Workers in a landfill site. KaYann/AdobeStock.com

The World Bank revealed in its 2024 Poverty and Shared Prosperity report that almost half the world’s population is living in poverty, subsisting on less than $6.85 per day. Since the 1990s, extreme poverty - people living on less than $2.15 per day – had been steadily declining, but this progress has stalled in recent years due to lower economic growth and major events, including the Covid pandemic, high inflation, as well as growing conflict and instability.

The charity Joseph Rowntree Foundation - which defines poverty as someone’s resources being below their minimum needs - says in its latest report that one in five people in the UK are living in poverty, including 4.3 million children and 1.9 million pensioners. 

To effectively address poverty, solutions include improving access to education, healthcare, employment and social security. The UN advocates that states take a human rights-based approach to reducing poverty, arguing that poverty is both a cause and consequence of human rights violations, such as the right to adequate housing, food and nutrition, and an enabling condition for other violations.

Juan Manuel, a partner at Pérez Bustamante & Ponce in Ecuador and co-chair of the IBA’s Poverty and Social Development Committee, says there is a strong connection between the rule of law and poverty. ‘When the rule of law is strong, it ensures the protection of human rights, equality before the law, and social justice, which can contribute to reducing poverty,’ he says. ‘However, in contexts where the rule of law is weak, corruption, impunity, and lack of access to justice can perpetuate poverty, as resources and opportunities are not distributed equitably.’

The LexisNexis Rule of Law Foundation has published statistics that demonstrate a direct correlation between the rule of law and socioeconomic measures such as GDP, life expectancy and murder rates. Its analysis of over 50 countries in 2015 showed that the stronger the rule of law, including anti-corruption measures, government transparency and respect for human rights, the wealthier the country and its people tended to be.

Carmen Pombo works on international projects for the Fundación Fernando Pombo, a Spanish legal association, which aims to strengthen the rule of law and human rights of the most vulnerable and set up in honour of her father, a former President of the IBA. She says that responsible business and human rights practices are needed to meaningfully reduce poverty. ‘To reduce exploitation and help lift people out of poverty multinationals, when conducting human rights due diligence, should assess, among other matters, the living wage and how to (contractually or through other means) promote fair living wages by suppliers,’ she says.

Pombo says that tax abuses and illicit financial flows also impact the poor because funds lost to financial crime limit the money available to improve people’s access to basic needs such as education, adequate healthcare and water sanitation. ‘Tax abuses and illicit financial flows generate and perpetuate poverty,’ she says.

Advancements in artificial intelligence may also have a disproportionately negative impact on the economically disadvantaged, Pombo says, because many people living in poverty don’t have access to digital education which makes them more vulnerable to the biases and discrimination that AI algorithms can create. ‘AI businesses face potential risks of human rights breaches as their algorithms might discriminate generating bias against the poor,’ she says.

Access to justice is another major issue that people living in poverty face. People living in poverty are often unable to seek legal redress for actions that adversely affect them. Leonardo Melos, a partner at Bergstein Abogados in Uruguay and the Co-Chair of the IBA’s Access to Justice and Legal Aid Committee, says that solutions can include increasing government funding for legal aid clinics, located in diverse areas, for those that cannot afford legal representation and imposing obligations on public and private law schools to provide legal aid services. ‘In many, many cases the funds for legal aid services are not sufficient,’ he says.

Pombo says that because people living in poverty often spend most of their time trying to stay alive or avoid getting into trouble with the authorities, even when there are laws introduced to protect them from harms such as discrimination and violence, they are unlikely to make claims. In 2021 Spain introduced a hate crime law that can be applied to economically disadvantaged groups. ‘What we see is that there are no claims from the homeless on hate crimes against the poor, because they’re worried about the criminalisation of their day-to-day acts, like getting fines for sleeping on benches,’ she says. ‘The legislation is ahead of what is actually in their capacity to ask for’.

Not having a permanent address or access to the internet also makes receiving communications from lawyers or the courts difficult. Pombo says other vulnerable groups include trafficked women, children and forced migrants who cannot access the same rights as wealthier individuals.

Manuel says that high poverty rates can have serious implications for the rule of law. ‘Extreme poverty can lead to distrust in institutions and social discontent, which can be exploited by populist or autocratic movements that promise quick and radical solutions,’ he says. ‘These movements often undermine the rule of law by concentrating power in the hands of a few and eroding democratic institutions.’