Social Justice in an Open World: The Role of the United Nations
makes reference to world poverty, whereas the Millennium Development Goals are clearly focused on developing (and especially least developed) countries. The World Summit text calls for the formulation or strengthening of national strategies to reduce "overall poverty in the shortest possible time ... by a target date to be specified by each country in its national context" (Commitment 2, para. (a)).By contrast, the Millennium Development Goals incorporate a specific target (understood to be limited to the developing world), which is to halve the proportion of poor people by 2015. The Copenhagen Declaration does not provide a precise definition of the poor; the text includes references to overall, absolute, extreme and relative poverty, but leaves it to each country to interpret these concepts. In the Millennium texts, extreme poverty is defined as the condition experienced by those "whose income is less than one dollar a day" (para. 191, and reference is made to the more than 1 billion people currently living in such dire circumstances. No estimate of the number of the world's poor is ventured in the Copenhagen Declaration; however, quite illogically, the Programme of Action refers to the same "over 1 billion" figure estimated by the World Bank at the beginning of the 1990s. Leaving aside the controversy surrounding the merits of the dollar-per-day income poverty benchmark and the accuracy and significance of the now universally quoted "over 1 billion poor", the approaches adopted by the World Summit and the Millennium Summit to address extreme poverty have little in common. The decision to establish a specific global target for poverty reduction, as recommended by the Secretary-General in his report to the Millennium Summit,33was probably taken to ensure its widespread appeal and visibility in this media-dominated age. The world's imagination and enthusiasm were indeed stimulated by this target that appeared to be both ambitious and realistic; the reference to "halving" gave the impression that calculations had been made to distinguish the achievable from the ideal. The simplicity, visibility and appeal of the Millennium approach were counterbalanced by its lack of depth, comprehensivenessand rigour. Furthermore, the Forum could not help noting that what was presented as an innovation and a decision requiring political courage-the agreement on an apparently precise objective-actually reflected a long-standing practice in the United Nations and other international organizations that had produced consistently disappointing results. During the last few decades of the twentieth century, various world conferences established a multitude of targets relating to most aspects of human welfare, including nutrition, education, health and housing, with satisfaction generally promised to all by the year 2000. These commitments were rapidly forgotten. The World Summit for Social Development resisted the temptation to establish poverty reduction targets, but its Programme of Action included no less than 14 targets relating to education, health and the provision of shelter; most of these objectives were to be met by 2000 or 2015, and several were incorporated in the Millennium