The Easterly Criteria for Human Rights

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Bill Easterly argues that poverty is not a human rights violation. His line of thought could be used to argue that health is not a human right either, which is why I will discuss this in this blog post.

Prof. Easterly states: "The only useful definition of human rights is one where a human rights crusader could identify WHOSE rights are being violated and WHO is the violator. ... human rights are a clear dichotomy - someone violates your rights or they do not."

So basically Easterly proposes three criteria for a right to qualify as a human right:

• There needs to be a clear bearer of the right.
• Violations need to be clearly attributable to an actor (the "violator").
• There needs to be a clear distinction between situations in which human rights are violated and situations in which they are not.

All these qualifications are problematic, because they depend on absolutes - and human rights rarely deal with such absolutes.

First of all, as I mentioned before, various human rights can be applicable to the same situation but be diametrically opposed. E.g. in the case of of abortion in the last month due to obstetrical complications, the foetus' right to life could stand diametrically opposed to the mother's right similar right to life. This would violate the last two requirements. It is unclear who is the violator; both in the case of abortion, as in the case of a mother's death because she doesn't have access to abortion services. It is also unclear whether a human right is being violated or not, due to the problematic status of the foetus as a human being. So would Easterly argue that there is no human right to life?

Secondly, many human rights (like the right to health) are collective in nature. E.g. the right to self-determination (art. 1 of the ICCPR) is a right that is exercised by peoples, not people. This would violate Easterly's first requirement, and hence he would seems to argue that there is no human right to self-determination - something that hardly any human-rights specialist would agree with.

The three ‘Easterly criteria' are linked to a view of human rights that only encompasses Vasak's ‘first generation'. We have moved on since then, and second-generation human rights are universally accepted.

Does this mean that I think that poverty per se is a human rights violation? No, but for very different reasons than Easterly. But as this blog is about global health, not global poverty, I will need to leave that discussion for some other opportunity.