E/CN.4/2006/43 page 20 community’ to provide the needed assistance. The scheme would enable the developing country, once it had satisfied its own commitments, to invoke certain ‘callable commitments’ which would have been made in advance and made dependent upon the required progress by the government concerned.”6 68. The reference to the Millennium Development Goals in the above quotation of Philip Alston can be, without any loss of reasoning, replaced by our objectives of removing extreme poverty. In fact, by concentrating on a much smaller universe of people, compared to all the poor people in the world, the appeal of the argument for solving the problems of extreme poverty would be much stronger. Clearly, if the international community decided to act, it could do so without much problem. 69. It is in this context a further proposal can be made: removing the conditions of poverty should be treated as a “core” obligation which should be realized immediately and not subjected to progressive realization. In other words, the removal of extreme poverty should have the same standing as that of most human rights objectives. Resource costs would be manageable, national States must be able to introduce changes in their legal and institutional systems and the international community must be prepared to adjust the rules of trade, debt and financial transactions and be prepared to provide assistance to countries carrying out their national obligations to remove extreme poverty. IV. CONCLUSION 70. It has been argued in this report that the international community must accept the eradication of extreme poverty as a human rights obligation. The definition of poverty will have to be in accordance with the consensus of the different countries concerned. The predominant consideration would be to choose a small section of the population which is clearly and demonstrably most vulnerable to suffering from all forms of deprivation. Since poverty is defined as the sum total of income poverty, human development poverty and social exclusion, extreme poverty would be regarded as an extreme form of that poverty. That form can be most conveniently defined as an intersection of all three types of poverty. In some countries, however, especially those which are relatively developed and may not have the severe problem of either income poverty or human development poverty, the group suffering from social exclusion may dominate the set of extremely poor people, supplemented by conditions of income and human development poverty to the extent that they exist. The idea is to identify as extremely poor any group whose number is limited so that the society does not find it unmanageable to deal with their problems. Once such a group is identified, the removal of their conditions of extreme poverty must be taken as an obligation corresponding to the fulfilment of human rights norms. Even if the countries concerned may not be able to ensure the realization of all human rights, those rights the denial of which have directly caused extreme poverty, should be subject to immediate fulfilment. The international community and all member States should thus take up the obligations for removing extreme poverty as a core element of their human rights obligations.