Orange County civil rights and homeless advocates will meet with a United Nations investigator on Monday, Dec. 4, to present evidence that local governments’ treatment of homeless people constitutes a violation of international human rights.

The U.N. Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, is touring the United States for two weeks to research his upcoming report on extreme poverty in America. It will be partially based on his visits to Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Atlanta, Puerto Rico, West Virginia, and Montgomery, Ala.

Orange County representatives from the American Civil Liberties Union, UC Irvine and the Elder Law and Disability Rights Center wrote Alston letters in October, alleging that local anti-camping ordinances and other laws unfairly criminalize homelessness. Based on those letters, he agreed to meet so they can present evidence to support their claims.

“(Alston) is determining what governments here should be doing to protect the rights of the people who are homeless and whether people’s rights are being violated under international law,” said Catherine Sweetser, co-director of UC Irvine’s International Human Rights Clinic. “If homeless people don’t have anywhere to go and they have to camp, and if governments criminalize that behavior, it violates people’s domestic civil rights and international human rights.”

The ACLU has said that 33 of Orange County’s 34 cities have anti-camping ordinances that criminalize the act of sleeping in public spaces, pushing homeless people to remote and sometimes dangerous locations, such as the banks of the Santa Ana River. If police issue a citation or misdemeanor charge in response to a homeless person camping or possessing an unregistered bicycle, it sometimes can result in mounting fines or jail time, said attorney Brooke Weitzman, of the Elder Law and Disability Rights Center.

Several times this year, county employees have cleared homeless encampments along the riverbed, saying the area is not intended for human habitation, and citing concerns about public safety and the safety of the homeless. Sweetser said the advocates will discuss the county’s actions with Alston.

Alston on Wednesday said that “great poverty and inequality” exist in America, despite the nation’s wealth. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has said that extreme poverty involves a lack of income, a lack of access to basic services and social exclusion. It also has said that poverty can cause human rights violations, when the poor are forced into unsafe and unhealthy conditions.

“I would like to focus on how poverty affects the civil and political rights of people living within the U.S., given the United States’ consistent emphasis on the importance it attaches to these rights in its foreign policy,” Alston, a native Australian who teaches law at New York University, said in a prepared statement.

Alston plans to release his report on American extreme poverty in spring 2018 and present it to the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva in June. This year, Alston has released reports on poverty in the nations of China, Saudi Arabia, and Mauritania.