Summary: Declaration of the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign on the Full Realization of Human Rights in the U.S.

Human rights are universal and indivisible. Their realization requires guarantees for all persons, regardless of race, gender, class, age, sexual orientation, disability, immigration, language or other status of the complete set of rights: civil, political, economic, social, and cultural.

These principles are grounded in the founding documents of human rights, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), unanimously ratified by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948, and the principal human rights treaties: the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

Economic, social, and cultural rights include the following:

• The right to education guarantees free and compulsory primary education and equal access to secondary and higher education.
• The right to health guarantees access to adequate health care, nutrition, sanitation, and to clean water and air.
• The right to housing guarantees access to a safe, habitable, and affordable home with protection against forced eviction.
• The right to food guarantees the ability to provide nutritious food for oneself and one’s family, and obligates states to cooperate in the equitable distribution of world food supplies.
• The right to work guarantees the opportunity to earn a living wage in a safe work environment, and provides for the freedom to organize and bargain collectively.
• The right to social security guarantees an adequate livelihood, sufficient to meet all basic needs consonant with a dignified life, to every member of society, including those who are retired, disabled, or temporarily unemployed.
• The right to participate in cultural life guarantees all people, including members of ethnic, cultural, linguistic, religious, and other minorities, the freedom to take part in cultural life and to enjoy their own distinctive culture, including their own language.

The Declaration calls upon the United States to take the following actions:

Ratify, without reservations, the major human rights treaties, including the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights;

Adopt legislation and regulations at all levels of government implementing the standards set forth in the major human rights treaties;

Develop national plans, with full public participation, to achieve progressively the full realization of all human rights, with particular emphasis on the following:

The right to education: including redressing the funding imbalances that deny children in low-income school districts their right to an adequate education, ensuring that disabled and special needs children have access to appropriate learning environments, and expanding job training and vocational skill-building programs, in order to help young people enter the workforce and more mature workers adapt to shifts in a rapidly changing economy;

Regarding the right to health: including seeking short-term means to guarantee access to health care for the nearly 40 million Americans without health insurance and developing and implementing a national plan to provide affordable prescription medicines to all Americans;

Regarding the right to housing: including immediately developing mechanisms to prevent homelessness and expanding construction and redevelopment in order to increase the available stock of decent, affordable low- and middle-income housing;

Regarding the right to food: including making food distribution to those currently suffering from hunger a national priority and expanding existing nutrition programs, particularly those serving children;

Regarding the right to work: including ensuring that all Americans are given the opportunity, and the necessary skills to engage in productive work; guaranteeing that all workers receive a genuine living wage adequate to support themselves and their families for a work week not exceeding forty hours; ensure affordable, accessible and high-quality childcare for working parents;

Regarding the right to social security: including instituting policies to provide a basic minimum income sufficient to guarantee a dignified life for all Americans, including retired persons, persons with disabilities, and those experiencing unemployment or underemployment;

Regarding the right to participate in cultural life: including ensuring that the country’s domestic security agenda does not result in further marginalization and persecution of ethnic, religious, and cultural minorities in the United States and protecting the right of linguistic minorities to preserve and enjoy their unique languages;

Broadly, we call upon the United States government to publicly acknowledge that the greatness of a country is accurately measured not by its military victories and the personal fortunes of its wealthiest citizens, but by the degree to which all its citizens and residents are able to freely exercise their economic, social, cultural, civil, and political rights, and to flourish within a just society mindful of the good of all persons, including the weakest and most vulnerable.