E/CN.4/2006/43 page 11 30. From the above description of recognizing a social objective as a human right, it should be clear how significant a step forward it would be to alleviate poverty, if poverty could be appropriately identified as a human rights violation. In that case, poverty alleviation could be equated to redressing that violation and fulfilling those rights. First, State authorities in countries where people live in poverty would be obliged to design and implement appropriate policies to remove poverty. Secondly, among all the alternative policy goals, the removal of poverty should receive the highest priority. Thirdly, the international community, donor States, international institutions, multilateral institutions and multinational corporations would have to cooperate to enable nation States to implement anti-poverty programmes. 31. It is basically the “obligations” that are entailed by the “human rights” whose deprivation is recognized as poverty that changes the nature of the discourse of economic development, which makes poverty removal a principal objective. Since all agents of a society share the obligation to help realize that objective as a human right, the State authority, as the primary duty bearer, could quite legitimately invoke the active contribution and involvement of all or most of them and design appropriate tax subsidies and expenditure policies. Very seldom can State authorities plead helplessness or the inability to carry out those policies because the State can formulate laws and enact rules and procedures that are binding on all members of the society. They could involve grass-root organizations and work out participatory development programmes that have a much greater chance of success than top-down bureaucratically administered policies. For most poor countries, one could always find some feasible anti-poverty programmes. What is lacking in those countries where such programmes are not implemented is the political will of State authorities and the inability to involve different agencies and people in participatory, ground-level development. 32. The characterization of human rights obligations that makes it trump other obligations regarding social policies, giving it the first priority among all policy actions, implies that the authorities must be able to withstand the trade-offs between different interest groups benefiting from all its actions. 33. Given the limited stock of resources at a given time, following one objective would mean less achievement of other objectives, and therefore dissatisfaction of some lobbies or groups pressing for those objectives. It is not necessarily the cost of resources that prevents the prioritization of poverty eradication among the different objectives of a State. Compared with the cost resources and efforts to pursue most of the objectives of a modern State, including that of the military, internal security and supporting a bloated bureaucracy at all levels, in addition to servicing special lobbies, the expenditure on poverty alleviation would often be rather small, and would seldom be regarded as beyond a country’s means. The strength of the political lobbies supporting the different objectives determines the policy priorities of the different States. Accordingly, the highest priority for poverty eradication would be the direct result of the State’s recognition of human rights and seeing poverty as a deprivation of those rights. Accepting poverty removal as a human rights objective provides the ground for rearranging priorities and settling the trade-off between different interest groups. To allow an effective implementation of a poverty removal policy using whatever resources are required would require a social consensus, whether generated internally or derived externally from the membership of the international community that has accepted the human rights law.