Poverty and Justice: From The Poverty Of Law To The Rigth Of Poverty

Abstract

The law, understood as the set of rules that organizes life in a given society (objectivemeaning) and recognizes the prerogatives of the members of the said society or subjects of law (subjective meaning), is incapable of effectively fighting against poverty. Indeed, the law seems to be powerless against this social fact, or even scourge, to the point that it displays sometimes contradictory attitudes to it, crystallising in a shifting legal categorisation. Fortunately, it is not resigned: it perpetually reinvents ‘stratagems’tending to establish an artificial equality between the members of the community and protect the weakest or most vulnerable among them. Justice is one of the social sectors where the interaction between ‘law and ‘poverty’ is particularly evident. While it is true that poverty can be a barrier to access to justice, the restriction of the right to access to justice reinforces or leads to poverty. This contribution is based on a historio-epistemo-comparative approach: it first used the exegetical method to analyze the scope and basis of the legal framework of poverty and its implication on access to justice, before resorting to the comparative and historical method in order to identify the origin of the solutions proposed by Congolese law on the issue in relation to the Belgian and French systems with which it has close sociological links. The study thus demonstrates the difficulty that developing countries, particularly the Democratic Republic of Congo, have in meeting this challenge, both in the field of adult justice and in that of juvenile justice, where the problem is more acute, especially from a different position.

Keywords

• droit (de l’homme)
• indigence
• justice
• pauvreté
• vulnérabilité