The Fight Against Poverty and the Right to Development in Italy

The Chapter casts a glance at the fight against poverty and the right to development as they come into sight at the intersection between public international law and Italy’s domestic and international legal practice. In public international law, “fight against poverty” is shorthand for a vast domain of political and diplomatic action as well as for an ill-defined bundle of economic and social rights, at the core of which lies the universal entitlement to an adequate standard of living, including adequate food, clothing and housing. Italy is a party to several treaties recognizing that right at the universal and regional levels and, as such, it is subject to various form of international oversight. As for the right to development, none of the treaties mentioning it binds Italy and Italian judicial and administrative authorities never took it into account for interpretative purposes. The Chapter argues that the right to development is decaying into a mere appendage of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) it formulates, and that the latter, far from being the continuation of international law by other means, are expressive of a different kind of normativity, which ousts much more than it complements international law. The review mechanism put in place under the SDGs rests on a purely voluntary basis and, as Italy’s recent experience shows, it allows little scope for criticism of national performances. After a preliminary discussion of Italy’s compliance with the relevant rules and principles of international law via the ordinary operation of its own legal order, the Chapter contends that Italy’s record before international monitoring bodies is as inglorious—especially for what was not done to cushion the economic and financial crisis—as the report it submitted under the 2030 Agenda is vainglorious, and likely to go unchallenged. In short, Italy’s enthusiastic embrace of the 2030 Agenda hardly conceals its continuing debacle in the fight against poverty and in defence of basic social rights, both at home and internationally.