U.S.-HABITAT: Homeless Advocates Decry U.S. Stance on Rights

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Feb 5 1996 (IPS) - When the United Nations kicks off the World Conference on Human Settlements, or Habitat II, this June, dozens of nations will argue that housing is a fundamental human right.

Those nations, however, may face opposition from a nation that lawyer Michael Posner calls “the 800-pound gorilla” of international politics: the United States.

With four months to go before the Jun 3-14 conference begins in Istanbul, Turkey, Washington has mounted a pressure campaign on other nations to deter any recognition that people enjoy basic right to have homes.

As one U.S. State Department memorandum last year stated, the U.S. delegation to Habitat II has a role to “make clear for the record that the U.S. does not recognise the international human rights to housing.”

Posner, executive director of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, calls the U.S. campaign “a fundamental assault on basic concepts of human rights.”

A coalition of human rights groups and advocates for the homeless argues that Washington’s position on housing is deplorable, and is now mounting a campaign to change it.

On Monday, the Centre for Economic and Social Rights sent an open letter to President Bill Clinton, signed by 18 U.S. and international agencies, criticising its Habitat II posture.

“Despite the opposition of U.N. agencies and almost all other government delegations, the U.S. has used its considerable diplomatic and financial influence to delete all reference to the right to housing from the Habitat II agenda,” the letter says.

“Mr. President, we are particularly disappointed that your administration which has otherwise shown a strong commitment to the universality of human rights, is using the platform of Habitat II to undermine the right to housing,” the authors add.

The authors call the current U.S. stance a retreat from Washington’s recognition of the right to housing enshrined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

They note that Washington did not call that right into question at the last Habitat Conference 20 years ago and that it is explicitly recognised in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights which was signed by Washington in 1966.

Miloon Kothari, a member of the Mexico-based Habitat International Coalition, describes the U.S. pressure campaign as part of an overall effort to uphold “a free-market ideology that has not worked anywhere, least of all in the United States.”

Washington may be using the Habitat summit as a launching pad to mount opposition to a wide range of social, economic and cultural rights, Kothari argues. Only a handful of nations — notably Malaysia, Sudan, Brazil and Japan — share U.S. objections to housing as a right, he adds.

Some U.S.-based activists regard the policy as part of a continuing U.S. retreat from its historic commitments in the New Deal and 1949 Housing Act to improve housing conditions nationally.

“We’ve seen consistently, particularly over the past 15 years, the government backing away from these promises” to provide affordable housing, says Mary Brosnahan, director of the New York- based Coalition for the Homeless.

Instead of adding to the decreasing stock of affordable housing, Brosnahan says, too many city governments simply sweep the homeless from sight and ignore their needs.

The most recent U.S. census estimates that some two million people in the who are homeless in the United States. But Brosnahan adds that the government defines some 29 million people — or more than a tenth of the U.S. population — as “shelter-poor;” that is, unable to provide adequate living conditions for themselves.

In addition, “over the past decade, we’ve had the highest rate of foreclosures since the Great Depression,” she says.

The rise in homelessness may be one of the chief concerns Washington has in opposing housing as a right. The State Department has argued that recognising the right would compel states to provide housing for all their citizens.

However, in a special rapporteur’s report on the right to housing, the United Nations last year made clear such a right “does not imply that the state is required to build housing for the entire population.”

Some analysts believe the State Department’s approach may be assailed by other U.S. government agencies more concerned about the nation’s housing crisis.

Peter Marcuse, a professor at New York’s Columbia University and an expert on urban planning, says that some branches of the U.S. government — notably the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), led by former San Antonio Mayor Henry Cisneros — have recognised the need to provide affordable housing.

Cisneros, Marcuse pointed out, is speaking at a HUD-sponsored conference this spring whose central topic is “Housing is Still a Human Right.”

HUD’s stance in favour of housing commitments may have been behind the toning down of recent U.S. policy statements on Habitat II, Marcuse says — adding that further changes in U.S. tone may occur. But Posner says the bottom line is that Washington still opposes housing as a right, and is still pressing other nations to do likewise this June.