United Nations, Tuesday, November 3,1998
Comments Presented by Cheri Honkala

Cheri Honkala, Director of the Kensington Welfare Rights Union, and Spokesperson for the National Economic Human Rights Campaign, spoke before a special meeting of the United Nations on Tuesday, November 3, 1998. The meeting, called by Mary Robinson, the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights, was a dialogue between Non-Governmental Organizations and the member nations of the United Nations on the five year review and follow-up process to the 1993 Vienna World Conference on Human Rights.

I bring you greetings from poor and homeless families from around the United States of America the ranks from which I come. We appreciate the opportunity to be allowed to address all of you today.

My name is Cheri Honkala and I am the director of the Kensington Welfare Rights Union and the National spokesperson for the Economic Human Rights Campaign. The Kensington Welfare Rights Union is a multi-racial organization of poor and homeless families based in Philadelphia that has been developing leaders from among the ranks of the poor and fighting to secure basic human needs for poor men, women and children in the United States.

In August of 1996, welfare reform was signed into law in the United States. The dismantling of the social welfare system is happening all over the world as a result of economic and legislative policies and the globalization of our world's economy. The dismantling of this social welfare system and the effects of other economic policies and changes throughout the globe are causing severe violations of economic human rights to occur to the world's citizens. We are watching a growing polarization of the rich and the poor on a global level making it difficult for much of the worlds population to secure housing, employment, food or healthcare or any kind of education. Recent figures from the United Nations showed that more than half of humanity exists on less than $2.00 a day, that 1.3 billion people are so poor that they live in shanty towns and garbage dumps, and that 40,000 die everyday from preventable diseases and malnutrition.

These garbage dumps, shanty towns and preventable diseases exist in my country too. As a matter of fact after the dismantling of the welfare system began we began to see things we never dreamed of seeing in our country. And this is why in June of this year we... poor and homeless people, began our Economic Human Rights Campaign. We toured the country in a new freedom bus going to over 34 cities and towns calling for Freedom From Unemployment, Hunger and Homelessness. We turned ourselves into human rights monitors and began to document our hidden stories of economic human rights violations. We began to understand that "welfare reform" the new law passed in our country was in itself a violation of our human rights. As we traveled this country we demanded a right to a job at a living wage. All people wanted was an ability to provide for their families.

That ability is decreasing daily. Those of us who have slept on the sidewalks can see the numbers growing. The fastest growing segment of the homeless in the United States is families with children. Families who must go daily and wait in line from early morning until 6pm at night, praying and hoping that the shelter provider calls out their name. That they and their children have been chosen for the few remaining beds for the night. Gloria, a homeless mother of three young girls in Philadelphia wasn't chosen and I watched her as she drowned in tears of desperation, trying to make a bed out of the sidewalk. Feeling the cold, hard pavement pierce her spine, she laid beneath the bright lights of the Marriott Hotel in center city and watched the rats as they traveled back and forth along the curb.

My friends, we see this growing poverty as a direct violation of Articles 23, 25 and 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Section 1, Paragraph 30 of the Vienna Declaration and Program of Action (VDPA) regarding "poverty, hunger and other denials of economic, social and cultural rights".

In 1993, the Vienna World Conference expressed its, and I quote, "dismay and condemnation that gross and systematic violations and situations that constitute serious obstacles to the full enjoyment of all human rights to continue to occur in different parts of the world. Such violations include... poverty, hunger and other denials of economic and social and cultural human rights." Today, these gross and systematic violations persist. In light of this fact and as follow up to the Vienna Plus Five, we recommend that the UN set up a special system to monitor the performance of governments in living up to their obligation of economic human rights.

May Gloria's tears of humanity turn into a river of justice, keeping our eyes on the rats, while ensuring a movement is built to put an end to the inhumane existence of living in poverty.