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Occupy Wall Street And International Human Rights, Martha F. Davis

Martha F. Davis

This article employs a human rights lens to examine the extreme economic inequality targeted by Occupy Wall Street (OWS). First, I look at the fundamental question of whether such economic inequality constitutes a human rights violation. To analyze that question, I begin by examining the extent to which poverty has been deemed to raise international human rights concerns, finding that international human rights institutions have generally addressed poverty by focusing on the ways in which poverty frustrates the exercise of substantive and procedural human rights. I then use a similar lens to examine the issue of economic inequality, concluding that …