HABITAT-ANALYSIS: Deadline To Resolve Row Over Rights

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

ISTANBUL, Jun 8 1996 (IPS) - Countries negotiating the right to housing have a weekend deadline for resolution of the issue.

A small, international working group will finish discussions Friday, and a wider committee of the U.N. Conference on Human Settlements will “look at it on Saturday,” according chairman of those negotiations, Ambassador Shafqat Kakakhel of Pakistan.

Sources close to the working group talks tell IPS that the draft text reaffirms nations’ “commitment to the full and progressive realisation of the right to adequate housing, as provided for in international instruments.”

That language, experts say, still falls short of the human rights commitments which housing rights activists have sought. But a member of the Human Rights Caucus added that U.S. delegates “have come a long way. This has been a real education in the U.S. human rights process.”

The working group is still haggling over language about the need to prevent forced evictions, with some nations backing language that only would forbid “illegal forced evictions”. As one source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said, “There’s more support for the right to housing than for the right to freedom from forced evictions.”

The intense debate on language, which continued into Thursday evening, helped to demonstrate how the right to housing has become all things to all people.

For some nations haggling over language on the right to housing in the draft Habitat Plan of Action, the right to adequate housing is a goal already stated in previous international covenants; to others, it implies a dramatic new commitment to provide housing for all.

To the United States, which opposes language that simply asserts housing as a human right, it is something both unnecessary because of prior precedents, and unwelcome, because of its legal implications.

On that point, at least, analysts are quite clear: If adopted by Habitat II, the right to housing could have a powerful effect in changing how homeless people, squatters, and slum dwellers, and people facing evictions deal with governments.

Scott Leckie, co-director of the U.S.-based Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions, says the right represents a substantial advance over previous international agreements to ensure the right to adequate standards of living.

“It means a lot more to a person in the street or a slum to be able to say to their government, ‘I have a right to housing’…than to say merely, ‘I have a right to a standard of living’,” Leckie told IPS. “That phrase is so vague.”

Speaking at a panel Wednesday sponsored by the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP), Leckie argued that a right to housing does not imply that every government need immediately to provide housing for all its citizens. But it did have some immediate effects, he contended, including restrictions on state efforts to evict people forcibly from housing.

“Housing rights violations are occurring on a scale unprecedented in history,” Leckie said. Since 1990, the U.N. Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights has declared several countries, including the Dominican Republic, Panama and the Philippines, to have violated the Covenant on Economic and Social Rights by evicting people forcibly.

“Eviction and demolition is prevalent in the Philippines,” said Teresita Barremeda, a member of the Phillipine non- governmental group ‘Process’. Barremeda said that, when housing residents become militant in asserting their rights as tenants, the government has responded with force.

Since last January, she told IPS, three entire urban communities in Quezon City have been evicted forcibly — even though, she noted, Manila has on its books “progressive housing laws”.

Similarly, a right to housing could open up a can of worms on topics as varied as the seizure of much of the Americas by European colonists to settlement activity in the Palestinian territories.

Professor Clovis Maksoud of American University in Washington argued that the United States’ opposition to housing as a right reflects at least in part a wariness stemming from the country’s “history of manifest destiny”. If housing is a right which cannot be denied to people, he contended, the Indian nations forced from their homes could have a new legal instrument with which to oppose the U.S. occupation of their lands.

Similarly, Maksoud said, Israel’s efforts to build settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories — justified by the need to provide housing to Israeli immigrants — was a misapplication of the right to housing.

“When the Israeli municipality (in Jerusalem) builds houses in the occupied territories, to provide houses to settlers, it is predicating housing as a right to expansion, not as a human right,” he argued.

Questions of legality may be the main reason why the right to housing remains up for debate, some officials say.

Jose Ayala Lasso, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, responded to questions on the U.S. stance by noting that “the rule of law is so important in that state that once the right of housing is a human right…people will ask for protection” under those grounds.

But he added at the UNDP panel that, regardless, the cause of human rights has been advancing step by step, and that governments now are being encouraged progressively to implement the right to shelter.

That pressure has even prodded Washington to reconsider what, last year, was a stance of outright opposition to housing as a right. Michael Stegman, assistant U.S. secretary of housing and urban development, said Monday that “my delegation comes to this historic conference to reaffirm the existence of the right to adequate housing as a component of existing human rights.”

Leckie deemed that language “a great leap forward” compared to previous U.S. opposition, but added Washington still has a long way to go before accepting the right as straightforwardly as the European Union and the Group of 77 (G-77) developing nations coalition have.

Only a few other nations, notably Japan and Malaysia, join the United States in opposition to housing as a right. Even in those cases, Leckie said, their opposition is mainly a result of worries about the juridical implications of having to meet housing commitments — which, he argued, need not be so onerous as to compel governments to provide housing they could not afford.

Nevertheless, the right to housing could imply more than merely a distant goal. Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, of the UNDP’s Human Development office, told the Wednesday panel that housing “is more than four walls and a roof, but a place to live, a home, in security, peace and dignity.”

That ambition may still be a step beyond what all the U.N. member states are willing to allow.