Inese Vaidere’s report on the impact of crisis on human and social rights was adopted by a large majority in the European Parliament. Vaidere, EPP Group Coordinator in the Human Rights Subcommittee of the European Parliament, in her report underlined that in Greece there coexist unimaginable wealth with abject poverty. Vaidere is a Latvian politician, serving as a Member of the European Parliament since 2004.
According to Deutsche Welle, although Vaidere’s report concerns countries outside the EU, many of its conclusions are also true about some EU countries. For example, the problem of the unbalanced distribution of income: in the last ten years, the inequality index has risen to 25 percent in developing countries. However, three-quarters of the people facing poverty live in middle-income countries, among which there are many European countries.
The basic conclusion of Vaidere’s report is that, “The more vulnerable social groups (the elderly, women and children) have to face more problems. More than 60 million children cannot go to school. More than a billion people live with less than a dollar a day. Women are the first to lose their jobs during an economic crisis, something that causes psychological stress not only to themselves, but also to their husbands who feel that their responsibility grows”.
Indeed, when we use the Gini inequality index (the Gini coefficient measures the inequality among values of a frequency distribution, for example, levels of income), we reach very interesting conclusions, Vaidere told Deutsche Welle, providing the following examples: “Russia is a middle-income country, where the extremely rich live side by side with the extremely poor. In the EU, the same happens in Greece, a country where I can see unimaginable wealth, but also extreme poverty. I think we should consider some redistribution of wealth in order to help the most vulnerable in crisis”.
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