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Conflict and Renewal: Europe Transformed. Essays in Honour of Wolfgang Petritsch
Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 2007, 407 pp.


Chapter 10. Politics and Economy
The Failure of Human Rights

by Jean Ziegler


"All human rights are universal, interdependent and indivisible. Clearly, it is not a question of pitting political and civil human rights against economic, social and cultural rights. The will to bring into force the human right to food is born of an obvious fact that Bertolt Brecht summarised in these terms: "Ein Wahlzettel macht den Hungrigen nicht satt" (“A ballot paper doesn't feed the starving”). The human right to food is today being thwarted across the vast conti-nents of Asia, Africa and Latin America. It is true that certain leaders of Arab-Muslim terrorist movements are being recruited among the more well-off classes, notably in Saudi Arabia and Egypt. But the immense majority of those who commit the terrible suicide attacks, attacks against civilians, are from the quarters of misery in Casa-blanca and Cairo, the sordid shantytowns of Karachi and Gaza. A victorious war against terrorism is first and foremost a war against humiliation, misery and hunger."


Jean Ziegler is the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food