E/CN.4/2006/43 page 19 64. If the universe of people suffering from these conditions can be reduced to a smaller fraction of the total number of persons suffering from the conditions of poverty, according to the definition of extreme poverty adopted in this report, the size of the resource cost can be considerably limited. Indeed, all recent studies of the Millennium Development Goals or Poverty Reduction Strategies of the World Bank and the IMF would suggest that the actual cost of removing extreme poverty would be quite small. In most cases, especially of people suffering from human development poverty or social exclusion, it will be necessary to implement changes in domestic laws or institutions which do not have large resource costs. The argument that the costs of removing extreme poverty would be unmanageably large in the modern world is clearly not sustainable. 65. Reviewing the arguments that have been put forward by several developed countries, their main reservation to an open-ended obligation of poverty eradication is that such efforts may be wasted without the commitment of State authorities themselves to remove poverty in their countries. There is some merit to this concern. However, in a human-rights framework, the obligations of the international community are made conditional upon the carrying out of the obligations of States that are the primary duty bearers under human rights law. There are, of course, some situations in which conditions of poverty are the direct result of international economic and social transactions, such as unfair trade practices, extreme forms of debt burdens or intellectual property rules, making the essential requirements of the poor too expensive. In these situations, the donor community and international agencies must take actions to correct those conditions, irrespective of the actions of States. In most other situations, the assistance of the international community would be dependent upon steps taken by States themselves. 66. In a recent paper, Philip Alston appreciates the logic of this argument. As he points out, “It will be difficult for countries to insist that they have persistently objected to such an evolution if they continue to affirm in so many contexts their commitment to assisting developing country governments to achieve targets as tangible and clearly achievable as the Millennium Development Goals. The correlative obligation would, of course, be confined to situations in which a developing country had demonstrated its best efforts to meet the Goals and its inability to do so because of a lack of financial resources. At that point it would have a plausible claim against the wealthy countries as a group and the argument would be that each of the latter would at least have an obligation to ensure that the assistance required is forthcoming, whether from one country acting alone, from a group of like-minded countries, or from an institutional fund identified by those countries for that purpose”.5 67. In that context, Alston refers to one example of an approach to international cooperation based on international human rights laws: “One illustration of this approach is the proposal emanating from the United Nations Commission on Human Rights’ former independent expert on the right to development, Arjun Sengupta, in which he proposes that ‘development compacts’ would be drawn up between developing countries and an unspecified and presumably largely self-identified group of donors. As long as the former fulfil their rights-based commitments to the best of their ability and capacities, the latter group would undertake to mobilize the necessary resources. Thus, a given country would propose a programme outlining both what needs to be done overall and what the country itself can achieve, while a ‘support group’ would ‘examine the obligations specified and decide on burden-sharing among the members of the international