Punishing poverty violates rights: Europe draws a line on anti-begging regulations
– The European Committee of Social Rights has ruled that municipal regulations restricting or prohibiting begging in Belgium violate the right to protection against poverty and social exclusion, while also having a discriminatory impact on people already facing severe disadvantage.
– The decision reinforces a position HOGAR SÍ has long defended: homelessness is never a matter of personal choice or the result of individual decisions. As such, it cannot be addressed through sanctions, displacement from public spaces or regulations that criminalise behaviours linked to survival.
On 17 August, a particularly significant decision for the protection of people experiencing poverty in Europe was made public. The European Committee of Social Rights concluded that municipal restrictions on begging in Belgium violate the right to protection against poverty and social exclusion under Article 30 of the European Social Charter.
According to evidence considered by the Committee, more than half of Belgium’s municipalities regulate begging in some form, with 253 municipalities identified as having restrictions that went beyond acceptable limits and interfered with the rights of people who beg.
But the significance of the decision goes far beyond Belgium or begging itself. At its core, it raises a wider question: how do our cities and governments respond when poverty becomes visible in public spaces?
The regulations examined included restrictions on begging in shopping areas, tourist destinations, railway stations, terraces and other public spaces, as well as fines, confiscation of money and other administrative measures. The Committee noted that many of these restrictions appeared to respond not to a genuine threat to public order, but to the discomfort created by the visible presence of people living in poverty.
The Committe’s conclusion sends an important message, one that closely aligns with HOGAR SÍ´s long-standing position: economic considerations, such as protecting commercial or tourist areas, cannot justify restrictions on human rights. Nor can the discomfort experienced by passers-by when confronted with poverty be treated as a threat to public order. Measures that target people for behaviours linked to poverty not only undermine their rights, but also contribute to their stigmatisation, reinforcing prejudice and exclusion, rather than addressing their underlying causes.
What the Committee rejects is the use of punitive measures against people for whom begging may constitute one of their last means of subsistence. Fines, administrative arrest or confiscation do not resolve poverty. Instead, the Committee found that such measures can further aggravate an already vulnerable situation and deepen social exclusion.
In addition, the Committee found that the regulations amounted to indirect discrimination on the grounds of ethnic origin and socioeconomic status, disproportionately affecting already disadvantaged groups, including Roma communities.
At HOGAR SÍ and the HATEnto Observatory, we have long warned that aporophobia does not only manifest itself through insults and assaults. It can also be embedded in institutional practices that blame people for their own poverty, restrict their rights or seek to remove visible manifestations of exclusion from public spaces – none of which actually solve the structural causes that lead people into poverty adn homelessness.
This is why HATEnto identifies and challenges what it defines as aporophobic ordinances: municipal regulations that are discriminatory either through their explicit content or through the effects of their implementation, contributing to hostility and the criminalisation of people experiencing homelessness and poverty. In recent years, HATEnto has analysed and challenged regulations in Spain that risk producing these effects, including municipal rules in Barcelona, Málaga, Tenerife, Madrid and Valencia.
The Belgian decision therefore sends a message that extends beyond one country: poverty cannot be treated as a public-order problem simply because it is visible. At the same time, it demonstrates the value of strategic litigation as a tool for advancing and protecting the rights of people experiencing poverty and homelessness. Decisions at the international level such as this one can play a crucial role in supporting efforts to challenge discriminatory measures and strengthen rights protections at the national level.
This is particularly relevant at a time when cities across Europe are increasingly debating the use of public space, hostile architecture, restrictions on begging and other measures that risk displacing people experiencing homelessness without giving them a solution for their situation. HOGAR SÍ has long argued that measures designed simply to remove people from public spaces do not provide an alternative and unfairly place responsibility on people who have themselves been excluded from the same system that was meant to protect them.
Sanctioning poverty does not make it disappear. Moving someone from one street to another does not end homelessness, it just hides it.
Public policies must instead focus on guaranteeing access to housing, adequate income, social protection and the personalised support people may need.
The question cities should be asking is not how to make poverty less visible, but what policies are needed so that no one is forced to live it in their streets.
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