Invert the priorities, place the fight against poverty at the top of the list of priorities for the EU.
Open letter to the Presidents of the EU, March 23, 2010
With European institutions
- Youth Appeal to Europe : “We have trouble understanding this world but we want to find our place in it”
- “Appeal to each person and to European officials”, at the Commemorative Stone in Honour of the Victims of Extreme Poverty on the Esplanade of the European Parliament: photos
- "Joining with young people to rid Europe of poverty and exclusion"
- The Fourth World European Committee
- The European Fourth World People’s Universities
- Cercle de pensée Joseph Wresinski
- European Fourth World Solidarity
Dear Mr Barroso,
Dear Mr van Rompuy,
Dear Mr Buzek,
We are MEPs coming from different political groups of the European Parliament, who have come together in an intergroup to fight to defend the rights of the poorest people.
We are pleased that the new 2020 Strategy proposed by the European Commission retains amongst its five main objectives the struggle against poverty. Nevertheless, with this approach the poor remain, with no pun intended, the ’poor relations’ of the EU. The fight against poverty is placed last on the list of objectives; the proposals are not very concrete and the objectives are general, for example "reduce the number of people threatened by poverty by 20 million."
We ask you to invert this thinking, to place the fight against poverty at the top of the list of priorities for the EU, to move away from the statistical approach and to see that each one of these children, women, men, is a human being, a citizen in their own right. We ask for concrete proposals concerning youth education, training, health, housing and the salaries of the lowest paid workers.
It is clearly a question of social justice.
However it is also, on European soil, a question of human rights because the struggle for survival prevents the most impoverished from enjoying their fundamental rights, it deprives them of social bonds, it isolates them.
Ultimately, it is also an economic challenge: to admit that there are more than 80 million poor people in the European Union is to tolerate an immense waste. Economists would maybe see ’a misallocation of resources." We prefer to say that poor people also have talents and knowledge. Provided that they receive a high quality education, their children will contribute to the richness of tomorrow’s Europe. They are not asking for charity but for dignity.
Even if the successive treaty modifications have ineptly removed the notion of "community" the beautiful vision of the founding fathers must regain its central role: "we are not forming coalitions of states, we are uniting men."
Yours Sincerely,
The members of the Intergroup Extreme Poverty and Human Rights - Fourth World Committee
Iñigo MENDEZ DE VIGO (EPP, Spain), President of the intergroup
Proinsias DE ROSSA (S&D, Irland)
Ilda FIGUEIREDO (GUE/NGE, Portugal)
Sylvie GOULARD (ALDE, France)
Jean LAMBERT (Greens, UK)
