On Sunday, rallies were held around the world to mark International Human Rights Day. At the United Nations, Human Rights High Commissioner Louise Arbour said that poverty should be considered a violation of human rights.

Louise Arbour: “In the Western world, we tend to think of human rights mostly as civil liberties, civil and political rights, at best a nondiscrimination. But there’s a lot to it. Civil rights are one aspect, but economic and social rights are also grounded in a kind of Roosevelt vision of freedom from fear, but also freedom from want. And poverty, I think, is both a consequence and a cause of very, very severe violations of human rights.”