“International human rights law articulates the principal ethical discourse of our time, with poverty and the exercise of human rights today recognized as intertwined phenomenon.”1 Poverty is thus increasingly being discussed in human rights terms, with the former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, on several occasions describing it as “the most serious human rights violation of today”. While the proposition that poverty constitutes a human rights violation in and of itself is contested it is arguably often the effect of egregious human rights violations.2 Seeing poverty as a violation of human rights stems from the concept of human dignity enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Based on Article 2(1) of the ICESR, States have a legal responsibility to take measures to “mitigate the plight in which an individual living in poverty finds him or herself” through application of the maximum of their available resources. Failure to take such measures, would constitute a violation of the rights contained in the Covenant.3 Myriad connections between human rights can be drawn. When for example rights to education, employment, equal treatment and other socio-economic rights are violated, poverty is the result. And the poor, by virtue of their economic status are “then despised and disrespected and discriminated against”, which is linked to poverty as social and political exclusion.4 In this perspective some of the root causes of poverty are discrimination, marginalization, disempowerment, inequality and lack of public participation as well as weak governance structures and lack of public accountability, which are all aspects that are anchored and protected in the human rights framework. In this view “rights-based approaches have no distributional metric (...) for making trade-offs, and are in fact based on the incommensurability of human dignity”. However, this notion prescribes a legal responsibility for poverty that States tend to be reluctant to accept. The World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna in 1993 was a decisive point for the recognition of the universality of human rights following the divisions created during the Cold War, and declared them indivisible, interrelated and interdependent. The Declaration observed “that the existence of widespread poverty inhibits the full and effective enjoyment of human rights (...) and that (...) extreme poverty and social exclusion constitute of a violation of human dignity”. However, the Vienna Declaration avoided directly characterizing poverty as a violation of human rights, as did the UN Human Development Report of 2000 rather characterizing it as a central challenge to human rights, while the Millennium Declaration resolves to “spare no efforts to free [people] from the abject and dehumanising conditions of extreme poverty”, making the basis for compliance that of an international minimum threshold. 5 CESCR has in an attempt to define poverty as encompassing a broader notion than an economic perspective defined poverty as a “chronic deprivation of the resources, capabilities, choices, security and power necessary for the enjoyment of an adequate standard of living and other civil, cultural, economic, political and social rights.”6 The ICESCR have in comparison to the ICCPR been criticised for vague formulation and lack of clarity in terms of the definition of the rights contained. Art. 2(1) obligates States to realise the rights contained in the Covenant “to the maximum of its available resources, with a view to achieving progressively the full realisation of the rights” and “by all appropriate means”. As regards the right to adequate standard of living, including food, clothing and housing States Parties are for example only obligated to “take appropriate steps to ensure the realization o