© Global Look Press / Peter Arkell
A homeless girl inside her shelter made from crates and cardboard, London, England.
A UN report on the shocking levels of child poverty in the UK is the tip of the iceberg. Since 2000, when UNICEF raised concerns over the state of British children, UN agencies have condemned British governments multiple times.
They have found that social policies violate the rights of women, disabled people and those needing legal assistance. This year, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, one of the treaties supposedly designed to prevent these social crimes, turns 70.
The individual articles of the Declaration are supposed to safeguard everything from the right to life and freedom of expression, to civil and economic rights, such as the right to decent work and pay, education and housing.
As I document in my book
Human Wrongs, the Declaration is a rather odd document. It was drafted by lawyers and championed by politicians on the winning side of the Second World War. The politicians said that the Declaration was merely aspirational and not to be taken as a legally-binding text. The lawyers, on the other hand, disagreed with the politicians and said that it should be legally binding. It was adopted in 1948 by the General Assembly of the United Nations, meaning that it had no enforcement mechanism. However, in 1976 the Declaration was finally adopted into British law as part of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Despite this, successive British governments have violated, in different ways, each of the Declaration's 30 articles.
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