 Hello and welcome to this Facebook Live coming from the UN Human Rights Office in Geneva. I'm Liz Russell and I'm joined today by the special rapporteur on extreme poverty in human rights, Philip Olston. Welcome Philip to this Facebook Live. Philip, could I start by asking you, what have human rights got to do with extreme poverty? Ah, everything. There's a clear right to be able to live in dignity, to enjoy a decent standard of living, to get access to education, health care and so on. All of these things are fundamentally linked to human rights and to see rights on the one side and poverty on the other is a big mistake. Well, we're living in an age of economic insecurity, also technological change, so that problem of extreme poverty is growing. One of the ideas that's been put forward and that you have mentioned in a report you've just presented is the idea of a basic income. Could you tell us a bit more about that? Right, so the idea is that in today's world there are fewer jobs in many respects. The jobs are less well paid. There are more pressures. A lot of people are being replaced by technological change, by robots and so on. And that leads to great economic insecurity, which in turn makes life miserable. In order to restore some sort of balance, to have a respect for, as I said earlier, the right to an adequate standard of living, the right to be able to live in dignity. Many people have put forward this proposal that everyone should be entitled to a basic income, so it's not dependent on whether you are in work. It's not the same as getting unemployment benefits. It's just because you are a resident of this particular country, you're going to be given a certain amount of money as a floor each month, which will then enable you to look for whatever work you want to do, to do more creative things or whatever. That's the proposal. It's got a lot of support from Silicon Valley and elsewhere, and I think there's a growing political push towards it. Well, may not one of the issues be not so much doing that, but actually addressing the problems of wealth accumulation. We have a couple of questions here from Fred Pratt, who says, what can you do when poverty is a result of political problems? And also a question from Caroline Gross, what about the World Bank's role? It controls everything. Well, Fred is absolutely right that politics and poverty go hand in hand. Poverty is a decision that we make as a society. We're not going to do anything about those people who live in poverty. It's a choice, and I think that of course is tragic and disgraceful and the violation of human rights. There's no country that doesn't have the resources to enable people to lift themselves out of poverty. The question about the World Bank, I agree to some extent that the World Bank is a key player. I think it is very important, and the World Bank has to its credit spoken about this, the need to address the extreme inequalities, the fact that you've got such a handful of males, elderly males, controlling the vast majority of the world's wealth is completely unacceptable. It's antithetical to respect for human rights. The Bank has spoken about that. I think the Bank does some very important work, but I do have a problem with the Bank, in fact, that it doesn't use the terminology of human rights. And so the message that it sends, I think, is greatly weakened and diminished by not focusing on the rights aspect of it. Well, you're a human rights expert, so you're talking a lot about human rights, but we have some questions from people here saying, well, you're basically just writing reports in offices. Aren't there just theories written from the lofts of those air-conditioned offices, not on the ground where the actual poverty is? So what do you as a human rights expert contribute to this debate on extreme poverty? There's certainly some. I mean, that criticism is not inappropriate, to some extent. A lot of the work that is done is done in offices. It's done in diplomatic contexts, trying to persuade governments and so on. They're trying to do analyses that point to how bad things are. But there's a completely different side of it as well, which is that an awful lot of the human rights work is done on the ground. The most important work is done by civil society groups working on human rights issues on the ground. And people like me, I'm a UN special rapporteur. I undertake visits. I've been in Saudi Arabia. I've been in China. I've been in Mauritania in the last few months. There I'm on the ground constantly. I'm talking to people whose rights are being violated, people who have been evicted, women who are being beaten. And what I'm trying to do is to pick up the message that they're sending and to convey that and to generate some sort of political pressure so that governments will actually respond. So it's by no means all office work. Well, we've spoken about the World Bank, but if I could bring in a question here from Mohammed Salwa Rajput Suleria. Hopefully I've got your name right. He says, if we want to fight against poverty, we must follow the Quranic law of wealth. That's a very important dimension. I think you'd find that people writing from a lot of different religious perspectives would have the same comment. Quranic law is very important. It's got the principle of zakat, the idea that one should share a certain percentage of one's wealth and income with others less fortunate, with family in particular, but not only. And I think that's a very good foundation. I would want to take it further though, as I said in a recent report on Saudi Arabia. I think it shouldn't just be left to the goodwill of the individual religious person to provide assistance, but governments should also play their role. Going back to the issue of basic income that you have in your report. It's talking about the fact that economic insecurity is a threat to us all, to all human rights. But some people might argue the issue of a basic income. Why should people have lots of money to get a basic income? Or why do people who aren't prepared to work get a basic income? Well, these are very good questions, and these are the questions that actually dominate the political debate in fact. So there's a very famous article by a philosopher which focuses on what's called the Malibu Surfer. And the question that he asked Philip van Parijs, if someone actually spends all their day surfing in Malibu, why would we give them enough money to survive on? Surely that's just undeserving. And the answer to that, you can approach it from different angles. The first answer is, look, everyone should be free to make their own choices. And if someone wants to do artwork all day long or sculpture or poetry or surfing, then they're still valid members of our society. We should at least enable them to live at a pretty basic level. Second more important argument in a way is that many conservatives will particularly take issue with this and say these lazy people, we're not going to support them. And so they support very strongly what's called targeting, which is we need to look very carefully at the whole community and we need to identify exactly the people who are in need. What all of the studies show is that that approach is vastly more costly, that you don't end up identifying the people who are in particular need, you include a lot of others, you exclude a lot of people who are very needy, and you spend a lot of money on this targeting. And in fact, a much more general scheme which is available to everyone actually is more efficient and more humane and more in line with our general values. You mentioned earlier Saudi Arabia, you've been to Saudi Arabia, you're presenting a report on Saudi Arabia. We do have some questions about Saudi Arabia that are coming in. There's one here from Morris B. Abram saying if Saudi Arabia is a gross violation of human rights, and this is what Morris has written, why did you yesterday defend their membership of the UN Human Rights Council? I suspect that's not from Morris B. Abram because he was a famous American Jewish human rights activist who died quite a few years ago, but I knew him. There's probably someone writing in his name. I think that what's important is not to demonize particular countries and I don't think that gets us anywhere. The most important thing for me is to engage with countries. Every country has human rights violations. I come from Australia, there's lots of human rights violations in Australia. I wouldn't support those who say let's boycott Australia, let's throw them off the Human Rights Council. We want to engage and in Saudi Arabia there's movement. There are pressures from women, there are pressures from a lot of people in Saudi society saying we've had enough, we really need to focus on improving the status of women in our society. We can't keep things as they are. And I think we need to support those people. We need to pressure the government to say you have an obligation to persuade the religious conservatives and others to start treating women respectfully in accordance with their full range of human rights. We have a question here from Suleiman Rashid, Wa'i Esbrin-Leoel. Again talking about the work of human rights experts and talking about workshops and conferences saying that a lot have been held to reduce poverty but to no avail. The poor are still suffering from food, medicine and shelter. How long can this go on? Do you as a human rights expert who works in this field have any hope for the future? Do you regard the future with optimism or do you think given all the challenges that we've been talking about with regard to the basic income really, really do present huge, huge issues for political leaders and also human rights people? So what human rights are all about for me are changing cultures, changing the way in which we think about things and changing the things that offend us. So we know 100 years ago slavery didn't defend a lot of people. 20 years ago the oppression of women in many contexts didn't defend many people. Racism didn't defend people 50, 60 years ago. We've changed all of that. There are still problems but basically we now agree these are human rights violations. The next challenge is to do the same thing for what I call economic and social rights. In other words, if we find people who don't have health care, don't have access to education, don't have housing, that's a human rights violation. It's not how our society should tolerate the system. We need to change that and I think there is hope, I think we're evolving but we really need to see these as fundamental values and as human rights. Well that message is clearly shared by lots of people watching this Facebook Live. We have a question here from Ildikopini saying how can people help the most impoverished countries? What resources do you suggest? A lot of it is political will actually in the country's concerned. We shouldn't be focusing primarily on how can we help some other country. It's how can we encourage the countries themselves and the people themselves to take control of their future. They need to, if there are countries where women are deprived of educational opportunities, health, food and so on, those women have to be encouraged, have to be enabled to take control of their own destiny as it were. So it's not a matter of charity, it's not a matter of how can we give a lot of assistance and so on. It's a matter of encouraging the idea that these are matters of human rights and that we should do everything we can to help those people to make that assertion themselves. Well Philip Olston, thank you very much for joining us on this Facebook Live and thank you for watching and sending in your questions. We'll be trying to answer some more of your questions on our Facebook site. Also to remind you that on Wednesday the 14th of June we'll be having another Facebook Live at 1830 Geneva time, that's 1630 UCT with the special rapporteur on the right to freedom of expression David Kaye when we will be discussing fake news. So once again many thanks and goodbye from the UN Human Rights Office here in Geneva.