This paper argues that contemporary international human rights have traditionally been marked by a conceptual and structural imbalance between the relative recognition and enforceability of civil and political rights, on the one hand, and economic, social and cultural rights, on the Other. This disequilibrium is inherently unstable and unsustainable, producing a ‘poverty of rights’ amid the unprecedented globalization of concentrated wealth and generalized misery, and is historically grounded in the dialectics of the origin of international human rights law in the intertwined processes of the European conquest of the Americas—colonialism, imperialism and slavery—and their epistemological implications. The issue of social justice is addressed in this context and explored in terms of its importance for the duality between neglected rights and neglected peoples, With emphasis on the case of indigenous peoples in Latin America. The paper further argues that there is an emerging paradigm of ‘international poverty law’ rooted in the demands of 80% of the world’s population for the satisfaction of their basic human needs and reflected in efforts to secure recognition for a ‘new international economic order,’ the ‘right to development’ and, more recently, the construction of a new ‘global moral economy, as set forth in critiques of the devastation of ‘neoliberal’ globalization.‬