Visiting speaker seminar

Speaker: Elizabeth Ashford (St Andrews)

Title: Hunger’s Unwitting Executioners

Abstract: Although the right to subsistence has been widely ratified, the persistence of severe poverty (understood as lacking the means of subsistence) is not generally classified as a human rights violation.  I argue that the interactional and institutional accounts of responsibility for human rights violations do not fit the nature of the complex causal chains that result in persons’ being deprived of the means of subsistence.  I argue that it should be understood as a structural human rights violation, responsibility for which is shared by the international community.