Kartik Raj is a researcher at Human Rights Watch (an international NGO), now living and working from Barcelona. He works on Europe and focuses on the human rights impact of poverty and inequality, mainly in the European Union and the United Kingdom. He has just published a report on poverty and the “weaknesses in Spain’s social security system”.
Your current work mainly focuses on poverty and inequality. What is the relationship between these and human rights?
I think it is really important to think about human rights and what they mean in a historical frame. Many of the mainstream international human rights organisations, particularly in the Western World, focused a lot on civil and political rights in a way that perhaps neglected economic and sociocultural rights. That was partly due to the effect of the Cold War, because the West cared about the first more. But the gradual realisation is that these two things go together; there is no dividing them.
We need to think about how we work more seriously on issues of economic inequality and poverty and address them as serious human rights issues because if we are not doing that, then we are failing to document the everyday lived experience of rights for many people.
Now you are working on food poverty. How would you define it and why is it a human rights violation?
I actually don’t think that it is worth focusing so much on terms such as food poverty, energy poverty, or child poverty. What is the problem that links them all? It’s much more useful to talk about poverty generally and then, if we want to illustrate it or see how it can affect a person, to think about it through the lense of food, hygiene, or others. Fundamentally, it’s about poverty.
What is the tendency in Europe?
The countries in Europe that we looked at [in our research] in the initial months of the pandemic, saw an incredible surge of people needing emergency food aid from food banks, local community groups, churches, mosques… We could all understand that there was an economic shutdown that no one expected; people suddenly didn’t have money; people who were working in the informal economy didn’t have access to the social security support that the governments put into place weeks later… But I don’t think anybody who was outside this field had a sense of how long that heightened need for food aid would continue. And it has continued. The need for food aid in Spain, for example, is significantly higher now than it was in 2019. And that tells us that the economic shock of the pandemic and the shutdown are still being felt. With the pace at which fuel and food prices are rising globally, this winter will be painful for many households. People on low incomes, single parents, and on fixed incomes like pensioners, always are hurt hardest by rapid inflation.
What does your new report on Spain cover?
We have published a report on poverty, social security, and the right to food in Spain based on research in Madrid and Barcelona. The basic thesis is that Spain already had a relatively weak social assistance system and some of the highest poverty rates in Europe. The pandemic came and despite efforts by the central government and some of the autonomous governments to put in place emergency support and new programs such as the minimum vital income program, poverty has got worse and more people need food aid now than before the pandemic. What these underlines for us is that even in a country where the government is trying to put measures to address poverty, something much more significant and fundamental needs to be done. People need a system that supports them and makes them more resilient.
How would such a system look like?
Some of the basics are a social security system that is as inclusive as possible and which doesn’t discriminate on the basis of age, nationality, residence periods and puts an end to some of the structural discrimination within the system that, for instance, women face.
One other thing is that the systems by which people apply for social support should be much easier to access and understand. It’s all well and good for countries like Spain to digitize everything and make it all available through the online “Cl@ve”, but when significant parts of the country are not computer-confident, you have to think about what alternatives there are.
And finally, it is important that systems really are based around a calculation of what people need for an adequate standard of living in human rights terms. And to some level, when we speak about state expenditure, that raises the question of taxes.
Have you seen changes in politics and the political will after the pandemic?
At the national level, in Spain, the clearest indication you have of such change of will is the coalition government’s minimum vital income plan. They already had such plan as part of their agenda and they brought it forward much more quickly. I think the system that was rolled out had pretty serious technical flaws, but it constituted an expression of the government saying we must not allow people to fall behind this minimum. It is a positive thing and we need to encourage them to stay on that path rather than pulling back support.
Has the pandemic also changed the way in which people see things?
The arrival of the pandemic was, in some ways, an equalizer, in that everyone was susceptible of being sick. But at the same time, it was something that underscored the inequalities that we already had. A thing that, for me, was heart-warming about the initial period of the pandemic was the way we saw new forms of solidarity emerge. There are some interesting aspects of that solidarity that have continued. But at some other level, I feel that a “return to normal” and to making money and taking care of yourself has resumed as well. The challenge for community and human rights groups, even city governments, is how to encourage these links and keep them alive in a way that is always growing and fresh.
What are the main human rights challenges in Barcelona?
In the city of Barcelona, the big questions are inequality and poverty, not only between poor and rich neighbourhoods, but also for those people who live in poverty within what are relatively wealthy neighbourhoods. One thing that concerns me, not just in Barcelona but beyond, is the amount of people living in irregular camps by the highways and train tracks. Also, as in every other big city, we find gender-based violence, identity-based violence, harassment, and discrimination.
Having lived here for some years now, how do you see the human rights sphere in Barcelona?
Barcelona is a very interesting place because it has a long history of social activism and mobilisation. There are people working in various different aspects of rights: freedom of expression, minority rights, antidiscrimination, poverty and housing. There is a big housing rights movement here.