Statement by Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing Mr. Miloon Kothari at the World Food Summit: Five years later (Rome, 10-13 June 2002)

World Food Summit: five years later
Rome, 10-13 June 2002

Statement of the Special Rapporteur on adequate housing under the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, Mr. Miloon Kothari


I have been encouraged by the Commission on Human Rights to bring the issues relevant to my mandate as Special Rapporteur on adequate housing, to the attention of forthcoming global conference reviews, including the World Food Summit: five years later (WFS: fyl). In my reports to the Commission (E/CN.4/2001/51 and E/CN.4/2002/59), I have called for a broad interpretation of the right to adequate housing as contained in international legal instruments, keeping in view the indivisibility and interrelatedness of all human rights. From a human rights perspective, the issue of housing cannot be separated from a range of other issues including food, land, access to potable water, poverty, gender discrimination, forced eviction, impact of national and global economic policies and international cooperation.

There is a clear and intrinsic link between the right to food and the right to adequate housing. Both rights are enshrined in article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and article 11 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), as integral components of the right to an adequate standard of living.

Hunger and homelessness are two tragic and related phenomenons. This dual crisis faced across the world today ranges from absolute hunger (starvation) and absolute homelessness to varying degrees of hunger and malnutrition and inadequate and insecure housing and living conditions. Being homeless or surviving in inadequate and insecure housing including lack of secure tenure has a direct bearing on your ability to feed yourself and to gain food security. Similarly having to pay a high percentage of your income on rents or mortgage for homes (often a result of market oriented processes that lead to land speculation) and high costs for essential civic services such as water, electricity, sanitation (often a result of privatisation policies and the imposition of user-fees) has a direct bearing on how much income is left over to meet food security. For the millions of the world’s citizens that live in self-built housing and rely on natural resources to meet their food and housing needs (fuel, fodder, water, building materials, medicine) the lack of a safe environment (free from pollution of air and water) environmental resources (forests, ponds) and livelihood threatens both the right to housing and the right to food.

The States, in reaffirming their commitments at WFS: fyl, must recognize these essential links and the indivisibility of all human rights. The right to food cannot be realized in an environment where violations of the right adequate housing take place, such in the cases of forced evictions from home or land. Similarly the failure by states to protect the right to food and the rural economy of small farmers leads to displacement to cities exacerbating an already stressed housing situation. Failure to grasp the enormous potential that the human rights approach can bring to sustainable environment and livelihood will only lead to a larger scale of hunger, dispossession and homelessness across the world. The impact of such violations can be particularly severe for such groups as women, children, indigenous people and small-scale farmers.

Globalization policies – including agricultural and services trade, intellectual property rights, finance, heavy burden on debt servicing and structural adjustment – will have to be managed in a way that is consistent with the duties and obligations of States which they voluntarily accepted under international human rights instruments. In the context of the rights to food and to adequate housing, it is important to keep in mind the obligations enshrined in article 11.1 of the ICESCR that urges all States parties to “take appropriate steps to ensure the realization of this right, recognizing to this effect the essential importance of international cooperation based on free consent”. Human rights can therefore provide valuable tools for States, in particular developing countries, to examine and counter existing and emerging international economic policies, so as to ensure that these are consistent with the principles and provisions of international human rights instruments.

These provisions of international cooperation places obligations** Article 28 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which proclaims that everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms contained in the Declaration can be realized; and Articles 2.1, 11, 15, 22 and 23 of the ICESCR, which build upon the foundations for international cooperation in articles 55 and 56 of the UN Charter, and the obligation for States parties to recognize the essential role of international cooperation and to reaffirm their commitment to take joint and separate action. on the part of the international community as well, including international institutions and supra-national entities and parties to various economic agreements, to remove such constraints on developing countries in pursuing their human rights obligations towards their citizens. Such an overview and direction for global policies must ensure that these policies do not in any manner inhibit or compromise the ability of developing countries to implement their commitments to respect, promote, protect and fulfil economic, social and cultural human rights commitments at the national level.

In pursuit of the operating principles of “solidarity” and “fraternity” of international cooperation, it is also essential to accept that there is a need to evolve strategies for distributive justice both at international and national levels, including land reform and increases in social spending on civic services essential to the realization of the rights to food and to adequate housing, such as potable water and sanitation.

These conceptual linkages between the right to food and the right to adequate housing offer new insights into both the scale of the denial of human rights and on the benefits of solutions based on the human rights approach. In developing countries alone, 1.2 billion people lack access to potable water and 2.4 billion are without access to sanitation services. Clearly, problems of such magnitude are due to the lack of a global will to put into practice, in both analysis of the problems and in developing solutions, the human rights-based principles and instruments including acting upon the rights to food and housing.

It is my belief, therefore, that the WFS: fyl must unequivocally adopt the human rights framework and call for instruments and solutions that can lead to fundamental and systemic solutions to the grave crisis of the right to food and land rights facing millions of the world’s dwellers. It is gratifying to note that the draft documents recognize the human rights and call for developing a guideline on the right to food. I call upon States to take further steps to close the gap between recognition of the human rights relevant to achieving food security and their realization, and offer following proposals as practical steps for the States to:

· Recognize the need for human rights paradigm including compliance with international human rights instruments and support for emerging instruments such as a draft optional protocol to the ICESCR;

· Practice obligations on international cooperation as contained in the ICESCR and other human rights instruments, including calls for land reform and wealth redistribution and regulation of the practices of multinational corporations that lead to the violations of the right to food and housing;

· Halt processes of water and other civic services privatization as case studies across the world demonstrate that these have failed to ensure affordable access and coverage to the poor (see E/CN.4/2002/59, paras. 48-65);

· Arrest speculation and commercialisation of land and usurpation of public and communal lands and lands of indigenous people by private concerns

· Ensure provision of security of tenure in both urban and rural areas, particularly for low-income communities such as slum dwellers and small farmers;

· Fully recognize women’s equal ownership, access to and control over land and the equal rights to own property and to adequate housing including through the right to inheritance. And implement the housing and land rights of rural women, including their equal treatment in agrarian reform as contained in Article 14 of the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination against Women;

· Enact or strengthen legislative measures that prohibit racial and other forms of discrimination in all areas of the public and private sectors, that impact upon the rights to food and housing including planning and land policies and provision of essential services such as potable water;

· To respect the primacy of human rights obligations in all policy formulation including through affirmative action and provision of subsidies to protect the rights of women and vulnerable groups including children, small farmers, indigenous people;

· Adopt the type of integrated approaches that are outlined in Article 24 of the Convention on Rights of the Child that call for attention to rights of children to nutrition, health, safe environment, clean drinking water and sanitation;

· Adopt policies in rural and urban areas of the regularisation of homes and lands that people and communities have been forced out of economic necessity to occupy;

· Apply human rights approach in all poverty alleviation policies including PRSPs; and

· Ensure meeting goals of the Millennium Declaration by further strengthening international commitments on human rights and defining actions at WFS: fyl

From the perspectives of my mandate as Special Rapporteur, I will continue to work closely with the Special Rapporteur on the right to food and relevant treaty bodies as well as all partners in addressing issues that are on the table of the WFS: fyl and for implementing the Millennium Declaration. I look forward to positive results from WFS: fyl including the recognition and elaboration of obligations for human rights related to the right to food. Such an outcome can serve to provide the guidance that is necessary for a similar outcome to the World Summit on Sustainable Development, thereby acknowledging and empowering the human rights struggles being waged by poor people, including small farmer and peasant organisations across the world.


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