E/CN.4/2006/43 page 14 43. It is legitimate to ask the question: In spite of the fact that the aforementioned international covenants have almost been universally accepted, why have programmes not been worked out along these lines to remove poverty from the face of the earth? It would be difficult to argue that poverty alleviation programmes have not worked because appropriate programmes cannot be designed or are not technically feasible. Whatever the conditions of the international economy in earlier years, the world has reached a stage of development and expansion of resources in which poverty alleviation can no longer be considered as difficult or beyond the reach of most countries. The only reason why such programmes have not been adopted is that countries have shown no political will to adopt them or have not accepted their “obligations” that would follow from their legal recognition of the relevant human rights. 44. Several reasons can be given for this situation. First, the international covenants, as they have been instituted, do not have appropriate mechanisms of enforcing the related obligations. They have not been made “justiciable”, nor are the treaty bodies able to enforce these obligations on the States that are recalcitrant in fulfilling the terms of the treaties. Very few States, even after formally ratifying the covenants, have incorporated them in their domestic legal system or have taken steps to implement them through alternative mechanisms of checks and balances. 45. Second, some of the major donor States have not fully ratified these covenants or, even when they have formally recognized these rights, they have not accepted all the relevant obligations. Sometimes they have alleged that some of these rights are not defined precisely, and are supposed to be realized progressively because of resource constraints and do not establish clear obligations. 46. Third, there are problems of creating the grounds in a country to generate the political will necessary to recognize and carry out the obligations following from the international human rights laws. There are three main sources of international human rights law and concomitant obligations. First is the international treaties, which have their own methods of monitoring obligations. Second are general principles of law that are accepted by a society as fundamental values that keep the society together. Therefore obligations following from these principles are accepted as binding on all members of the society, even if there is no international treaty or law that explicitly recognizes or specifies those obligations. The third source is what is known as customary international law, that is legal norms which have become widely accepted as legally binding in practice and through commitments expressed by Governments. These norms become binding upon Governments and acquire the force of international law even if they are not codified in treaty form. 47. Although the international human rights community has made many attempts to appeal to these sources of international law for recognition of these rights and their corresponding obligations, especially those related to the removal of the conditions of poverty from the world, most Governments have not found these acceptable. In view of this, the notion of extreme poverty can be proposed as a concept that would be much more acceptable to the international community of States in terms of the obligations which can effectively remove those conditions and which can be more plausibly regarded as consistent with human rights norms.