We welcome the Guidelines of the Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing and her conclusion that the housing crisis is linked to socioeconomic inequality, financialisation and commodification of housing and land speculation. The key first step for addressing this crisis is for States to guarantee a legally enforceable right to housing, thereby ensuring that housing is valued as a human right, rather than a commodity.

Another important step is to address the role of the private sector by regulating real estate and financial actors, so as to ensure access to affordable and adequate housing for all, requiring human rights impact assessments of housing developments and encouraging collective or co-operative financing and ownership models.

We welcome also the Special Rapporteur’s Guideline on climate change, since the right to housing is increasingly threatened by climate change. Informal settlements across the world have been devastated by climate-induced disasters and slow-onset impacts such as sea level rise, and their residents suffer in heat waves and flooding. Informal settlement dwellers are particularly vulnerable due to their precarious living conditions, lack of resources for adaptation and their lack of political voice and influence in policy-making.

Further, climate change and disaster risk reduction are increasingly used as excuses for evictions of informal settlements to make way for modernisation projects, without rights-respecting resettlement programs for displaced persons.

In this context, States must urgently increase their ambition to tackle climate change and ensure that housing and climate policies are inclusive and rights-respecting.

Thank you

Statement read by Thomas Bagshaw, Global Initiative for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights

Contact:

Global Initiative for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights

info@gi-escr.org

3 March 2020