Over the last three months, openGlobalRights has brought together leading practitioners from various fields to debate economic inequality from a human rights perspective.
In framing the discussion, we argued that the worldwide pattern of growing disparity between rich and poor, and the steadily increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny elite, is one of the critical public policy issues of our time and a defining feature of our global economic order. A recent report from Oxfam reveals that the inequality crisis has reached new extremes, with the richest 1% now owning more than the rest of the world combined. Yet the implications for human rights of this alarming phenomenon have barely received attention from the human rights community.
The contributors to the debate so far are among the growing number of human rights thinkers and practitioners who are breaking this silence. Drawing on the threads of the debate, this article proposes four essential tasks for the human rights movement as it comes to grips with the conceptual, normative, strategic and methodological challenges that addressing economic inequality poses.
