COHRE Expert Group Meeting on Housing Rights – 26 Nov 2010
Geneva, Switzerland
Scott Leckie (COHRE Founder, Fmr Executive Director of COHRE and
Director of Displacement Solutions)
Delivered via Skype
Thank you first, to John Packer, my dear friend and comrade in arms since
1985, for your kind introduction, as well as your extraordinary contribution to
the world of human rights and your remarkable dedication to COHRE ever
since your membership on the COHRE Board began in 1994.
I have been asked to speak today about the founding of COHRE in the
Netherlands where I was living way back in 1991 - almost 7,000 dinners ago –
and to focus in particular on one of COHRE’s central areas of work – that of
standard setting and raising awareness of the position and legal status of
housing rights within the body of international human rights law.
For many of you – especially the Gen Xers and Gen Yers among you – it
would be virtually impossible to imagine the relegated place of these rights
within the world of human rights law way back in the 1980s and early 1990s.
Imagine an empty canvas with just the smallest splattering of paint from a
distant brush yet to make even one unique brushstroke and you’ll begin to
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get an image of where things were in the world of housing rights just over 20
years ago.
And this, of course, was despite the fact that the term ‘housing’ was found in
a whole host of standards that remain in force today. So, we faced a reality in
the late 1980s where very few were writing about housing rights, no
international human rights NGO anywhere paid any attention to housing
rights or to the billion or more people without these rights, and certainly there
was no global housing rights group in place foolhardy enough to have as its
prime mandate securing housing rights for everyone, everywhere.
But not for long….and before I knew it, the idea of COHRE was hatched in a
small room in the Dutch city of Utrecht where I was living at the time. When
what I thought was just an off-hand comment faxed to good ole Gregor
Meerpohl of the German funding agency Misereor solicited his immediate
reply and a gargantuan first grant of 10,000 Deutschemarks, COHRE was up
and running. I was 28 years old.
COHRE was formed without a business plan – or any plan for that matter – or
with anything close to a vision of what it has become today; a multi-million
dollar global institution with scores of staff working in offices in every region
of the world. Rather, approaching the issue of housing rights and State
obligations from the vantage points of justice, our shared humanity, Buddhist
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notions of compassion and of international law, the task from the outset was
to ensure that housing rights would be defined and refined in the most
positive manner possible and that simultaneously, the practice of forced
evictions would be labelled as a distinct violation of human rights law.
Casting our minds back to the early 1990s, again, we need to recall that both
housing rights and forced evictions were not even peripheral issues in the
human rights world; at best they were distant concepts that even human
rights NGOs (let alone States and the UN) often found laughable. I vividly
recall in 1990 or so presenting a 30 page article I had spent a long time writing
entitled ‘Housing Rights Violations’ to human rights bigman of the time, Neill
McDermott who was then ED of the International Commission of Jurists for
publication. He looked at the title, smirked as only an erudite Englishman
can, and simply said “We can’t publish that; everyone knows housing rights
can’t be violated”. Thank goodness times have changed.
As it turned out, COHRE’s long standard-setting journey began right away in
1991 when a month of frenzied lobbying, drafting and re-drafting again
finally culminated in the first ever resolution by the UN specifically on forced
evictions, Resolution 1991/12. The sentiments of that first resolution, which
equated evictions with human rights violations, made a real difference, and it
was cited in numerous anti-eviction struggles that were being waged at the
time, from Panama, to South Africa, to the Philippines.
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Winning the battle to get evictions equated with violations spurred COHRE
to train our gaze to the much broader issue of defining housing rights and
government duties in the very best possible way; for defining housing rights
properly would make it just that much more difficult for States to continue to
effectively ignore their pre-existing obligations to respect, protect and fulfil
these rights. It was clear that the UN Committee on ESC Rights, which was
established just a few years before COHRE in 1986, would be an ideal place to
usher in a new era for housing rights. So, in 1991, during only its fifth session
COHRE was able work very closely with Committee members Philip Alston
(now with NYU Law School and UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial,
Summary or Arbitrary Executions) and Bruno Simma (now a Judge on the
International Court of Justice) to bring what became General Comment No. 4
on the Right to Adequate Housing to fruition. GC4 might not be perfect and if
adopted today might include certain issues which were not so prevalent back
in 1991, (especially the issue that preoccupies me most these days – climate
change and HLP rights), but I think most commentators agree that this new
standard was instrumental in bringing housing rights from obscurity into the
mainstream of human rights discourse and action.
At the level of the Commission on Human Rights a couple of years later,
again after excruciating lobbying and countless hours of far too many
cigarettes and coffees in the dreaded Serpentine Lounge we were fortunate to
have the Netherlands (with the surprise backing of Syria!) sponsor a
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resolution which eventually become Resolution 1993/77 on Forced Evictions.
This resolution began a process of engagement on housing rights issues by
the Commission and now Council which continues to this day. It’s nice to
recall that COHRE’s first Chairperson of the Board of Directors, Cees
Flinterman, who chaired COHRE’s Board between 1994-2004, was actually
the Chairperson of the Commission on Human Rights in 1993 and was
immensely helpful in ensuring that the resolution would have smooth
passage.
From the general, we needed to get ever more specific. So, with forced
evictions now more than once classified as a violation of human rights law
and housing rights defined in legal terms more comprehensively than ever
before, another crucial precedent needed setting; that of declaring a single
State perpetrator of forced evictions as a State acting in violation of
international law. And so now, the sites were set on the Dominican Republic
which rather synchronistically was to appear at the Committee’s fifth session
– the same session that resulted in GC4. The Balaguer regime in the DR had
been violently evicting slum dwellers from Santo Domingo since 1986 in a
foolish plan to cleanse the city in the run-up to the 500th anniversary of
Colombus’ accidental landing there. Putting together a detailed dossier of
evidence showing that the evictions were indeed violations of human rights,
and working closely with local Dominican groups like COPADEBA and
Ciudad Alternativa, the Committee grilled the rather dismissive government
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delegation, and for the first time ever, declared that a government had
violated the terms of Article 11(1) of the Covenant and that any future
planned evictions should be scraped.
We knew it would never be enough to ensure that past evictions were simply
condemned after the fact, and that it would far more important to prevent
evictions before they could be carried out – and again, the Dominican
Republic was the crucible for trying out this approach. Despite pleas by the
UN to halt its eviction programme, Balaguer issued a Presidential Decree
ordering the immediate eviction of two communities named La Cienega-Los
Guandules which were home to around 70,000 people. COHRE first carried
out a quick fact-finding mission to the DR to get as much evidence as we
could, and then brought housing rights activists Chichi Ceballos and Ana
Gomez from the DR to Geneva to testify directly about the past and looming
evictions. The Committee responded to the testimony and evidence with
what was effectively its first injunction – declaring to the Government of the
DR that it must repeal the eviction decree and bring a permanent halt to
evictions throughout the country. Amazingly enough, the Government
listened, the decree was repealed and the evictions were halted. Walking
through La Cienega-los Guandules as I was lucky to subsequently do many
times during my time at COHRE was always one of the most rewarding of
experiences.
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Having been fortunate enough to have worked as Danilo Turk’s assistant,
who is now Slovenia’s President, during his tenure as Special Rapporteur on
Economic, Social and Cultural Rights between 1989-1992, it became clear that
the time was now ripe for rights-specific rapporteurs at the Sub-Commission
and which right better to start with than housing rights. This happened when
Sub-Commission member Rajindar Sachar, then a High Court Judge in India,
agreed to become the world’s first Special Rapporteur on Housing Rights.
Sachar-ji (or the Sach Machine as I always like to call him) served from 19921995 and his tenure was of great importance in raising yet further the stature
of housing rights within the UN. His 1995 report presented a draft
Convention on Housing Rights, which we had hoped would somehow be
adopted at the upcoming Habitat II Conference in Istanbul in 1996.
However, US opposition to the entire notion of housing rights in the lead up
to Istanbul - Yes, during the Clinton years! – not Reagan, not Bush, but the
Clinton Administration - ed with almost religious fervour by US State
Department official Mike Dennis, scuppered any chance of a new treaty
becoming what could have been the crowning glory of a global gathering that
did indeed preserve housing rights, but without any new laws, mechanisms
or monies devoted to pushing the housing rights envelope ever further. The
Netherlands government again played a pivotal role in the struggle for
housing rights, and in that regard I have to acknowledge the stupendous
efforts of Dutch diplomat Karin Wester who – despite being mugged one late
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night in Istanbul during Habitat II following a lengthy and difficult late night
drafting session that lasted until the wee hours, did more than any other
governmental official at Habitat II to protect housing rights from the
relentless assault led by the United States - And, yes, all of the drafts of what
was to become the final language of the Habitat II document were stolen
along with her money and credit cards so we had to make it all up again by
memory…and, no, I did not pursue the mugger down the dirty dark alley
into which he disappeared…The next day was spent in Turkish police
stations but that’s another story for another day.
And, then, a year later in 1997 it was time again to try to expand the
boundaries of international law and really put meat on the bones of the
notion that evictions were violations of human rights. And where else to try
this than at our beloved Committee on ESC Rights, now chaired by our old
friend Philip Alston? With Bruno Simma leading the charge among
Committee members and COHRE providing drafts, comments and lobbying
support, in May 1997 General Comment No. 7 on Forced Evictions was
approved, thus again adding to the corpus of international legal tools
available to people everywhere to try and halt forced evictions wherever they
occur or are planned.
During COHRE’s next ten years we continued to work intensively on
standard setting on both the issues that dominated the 1991-1997 period, as
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well as on a series of new issues that we thought needed to be brought from
obscurity to mainstream. We were able to push successfully for the creation of
new Special Rapporteurs on issues as diverse as Human Rights and Income
Distribution (Asbjorn Eide), Housing and Property Restitution for Refugees
and Displaced Persons (COHRE Board Member Paulo-Sergio Pinheiro), as
well as a new position of Housing Rights Rapporteur at the Commission on
Human Rights.
COHRE was able to achieve further forced eviction resolutions, as well as
new standads on housing and property restitution rights for IDPs and
refugees, women and housing rights, human rights and structural adjustment
and a range of other themes. Equally, COHRE was the driving force behind
what became the Maastricht Guidelines on Violations of ESC Rights, General
Comment No. 15 on the Right to Water, The Pinheiro Principles on Housing
and Property Restitution for Refugees and Displaced Persons, as well as one
of the first proponents of new texts such as the Optional Protocol to the
Covenant and many others. Of course, it’s important to remember that
COHRE was never only about standard-setting. COHRE was always, and
remains today, really about justice and people, and continues to be dedicated
to its basic aims of promoting housing rights and ending forced evictions for
everyone, everywhere.
As we all know all too well, for hundreds of millions of people across our one
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world, housing rights remain a distant dream, and for many nothing less than
a living nightmare. In far too many places things are getting worse. So it’s
clear that COHRE’s purpose, COHRE’s place within the ever growing global
human rights community, it’s raison d’être, remain as necessary as on that
day in Utrecht in 1991 when COHRE’s work began in earnest. COHRE’s work
in the regions – Asia, Africa and Latin America – as well as it’s work on ESC
rights litigation, women and housing rights and other areas continues to
make a unique contribution.
Much remains to be done, of course, and there is no guarantee that the
progress achieved over the past two decades will necessarily remain in place
in an era of continuing economic fragility in so many countries. COHRE will
need to remain diligent, creative and engaged to ensure that the victories of
the past are secure and that new initiatives are undertaken to expand housing
rights protections ever further.
For instance, working together with the Special Rapporteur Raquel Rolnick
promoting the idea that States at least quadruple government expenditure on
housing matters could be a good place to start. It’s long past time for
Government’s to put their budgets in order and devote the resources required
to make the dream of housing rights a reality for all. COHRE and the UN
together can push successfully to make this happen.
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Though I made the best decision of my life when I decided to step down as
COHRE ED and Founder in 2007 to be a stay-home, full-time Dad who no
longer has to travel six or more months a year as I did during my tenure with
COHRE - and to start two new organizations Displacement Solutions and
Oneness World (with the much appreciated assistance of COHRE Board
member Robert Zoells to whom I am immensely grateful) - I would still like
to urge everyone working for COHRE today to be fully aware of the
unbelievable privilege it is to actually get paid to do human rights work, and
of the infinite possibilities to change the world that exist by working within
this still wholly unique institution. I would also urge donors to continue their
support for COHRE, an organisation whose best years clearly lie ahead.
Thank you again for inviting me to your gathering in the mighty lakeside city.
It has been a great pleasure speaking with you. Have a great meeting!
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