• Housing and Land Rights Day 2007: Stop Forced Evictions, Speculation and Destruction of Housing and Land!
  • Campaign Statement
  • Call to Action
    
    
• Building a Global Campaign: Act Together – Housing for All!
  
  
• Mapping the Housing and Land Rights and the People’s Housing Alternatives in the World
  
  
• Request for Urgent Action and Solidarity dealing with Human Rights Defenders

Cairo, Mexico, Nairobi and Santiago, October the first, 2007

On this World Housing and Land Rights Day, initiated by the UN as World Habitat Day, popular voices rise to confront the challenge of private interests that are destroying our global commons and human habitat. For Habitat International Coalition, its members and structures, this is a day also to commemorate our mutuality, solidarity and common vision that “another—and better—world is possible,” but only if drivers of global economy urgently change course…  >>>

…As governments and media hold security issues as their foremost concern, so do many UN programs.  We do not believe that the citizen’s security leads to justice, per se. Our concern that keeps us denouncing, criticizing and formulating proposals is that only a just city can become a safe city…

…On this day, HIC celebrates its own internal diversity with an outward expression of the need to cohabit this planet in a far less consumptive and more-selfless manner, with reciprocity and solidarity. This is a day to reflect on both local and global habitat policies, and set a people-centered, alternative course….

…HIC with many other networks is launching a four months Global Housing Campaign “Act Together – Housing for All!” onwards to WSF 2008 and its new expression all over the world on January 26.

Davinder Lamba, HIC President
Ana Sugranyes, HIC General Secretary
Joseph Schechla, Housing and Land Rights Network Coordinator
Lorena Zárate and Enrique Ortíz, HIC Latin America

Stop Forced Evictions, Speculation and Destruction of Housing and Land!

• Stop Forced Evictions!
• Stop Speculation in Housing, Land and Water!
• Enforce the Right to Housing Now!
• Enforce the Right to a Sustainable and Inclusive City!
• Support Affordable Housing and Secure Tenure for All!
• Stop All Discrimination!

In response to the sharp increase of massive forced evictions caused by mega-development schemes, global investment and property speculation across the planet, the Habitat International Coalition, HIC, which is an independent, international, non-profit alliance with hundreds of organizations and individuals working in the area of human settlements, has issued a call to action inviting all peoples’ housing and land rights movements, tenants and housing rights organizations and their allies to join a global effort linking the Housing and Land Rights Days in October 2007 to the World Social Forum Mobilization on January 26th 2008.

Every October since 2003, HIC has coordinated International Housing and Land Rights Days of Action to affirm the Right to Housing in opposition to neo-liberal policies. This year HIC's efforts will be part of a larger international call for housing rights for all.

• HIC´s Housing and Land Rights Day of Action
• Four Month Effort – October 2007 – January 2008

This year the International Housing and Land Rights Day and/or the celebration of the Habitat Day begin a special trajectory – a joining of forces with all who are in the fight to live with dignity and against evictions worldwide.  The initiative, this coming together is expressed in this website, and reflects a preparation phase for the World Social Forum (WSF) 2008 >>>

We have opened a space on the internet to facilitate and extend the global reach of our collective struggle to stop forced evictions, to stop the speculation of housing, land and water, to enforce the housing right, to enforce sustainable and inclusive cities, and to reach affordable housing and secure tenure for all.

This website will support all of us in our combined struggles.

• Share activities in this site in the events section
• All documents -regarding the issues that unite us- can be shared.
• Share all opinions about the space -its form and content- in the blog!
• All contributions are welcomed to better and complete the site, and if you are interested in participating or helping to organize this initiative, please contact us!

Three New Maps are now available to provide a graphic depiction and contextualization of the housing and land rights violations contained in the HIC-Housing and Land Rights Network Violation Database (VDB) and analyzed in the "Violations Escalating around the World Report”:

• A Didactic Map: gives a quantitative idea of the amount of victims of violations per country.
• A Technical Map:  indicates qualitative information upon some specific contexts where these violations appear, as privatization, natural disaster, internal conflict, war and occupation; it indicates also the density of the documented cases in each country.
• An Illustrative Poster: points out the same data as the Technical Map enhanced with pictures.

HIC Housing Rights Crisis! 2007 map and "Violations Escalating around the World report” elaborated by HLRN goes further than ever before, giving special recognition to evictions in situations of conflict, occupation, and war, with their intractable features of forced eviction and displacement. It draws on data from HLRN’s Violation Database (VDB), which documents the patterns of forced eviction, demolition, and land confiscation.
This report has been completed by the mapping efforts of HIC’s activist General Secretariat. It represents a new method of tracking violations of housing rights and marks one step in a process emphasizing the interconnection of seemingly disparate factors; development, conservation, privatization, forced evictions, demolitions, and dispossession.


A Fourth New Interactive Map is now online as well:

• “Peoples’ Housing Alternative” Map: displays cases with people’s-centered initiatives around the world to produce and manage the habitat. Some cases lead how to negotiate the habitat conflicts by coming to a solution and influencing the housing, city and habitat policies.

Over the past year, the coordination office of Housing and Land Rights Network (HLRN), a thematic group of Habitat International Coalition (HIC) Members, has received mounting information from various sources on an apparently increasing global trend of physical attacks, imprisonments and mistreatment of housing and land rights defenders, including several killings and at least one recent death in detention. In defense of the rights of the impoverished, disadvantaged, subjects of discrimination and the voiceless, human rights defenders have long maintained efforts to globalize their struggles and to ensure that each person's housing and land rights are respected, protected and fulfilled in accordance with states’ treaty obligations.
 
In the downloadable report: Request for Urgent Action and Solidarity dealing with Human Rights Defenders, you will find:

1. Case studies of human rights violations in Germany, China, Mexico, Egypt and India.
2. A table illustrating examples of human rights defenders, whose work related to housing and land, resulted in their attack or death in 2006 alone.
3. An analysis of legal duty holders of this on-going violence.

We urge you to distribute this report as widely as possible, so that it is available for everyone to use on Habitat Day (1 October 2007) and at the many activities occurring in out Campaign between October 2007-January 2008, as the situation of human rights defenders is increasingly more precarious.

HLRN Urgent Actions
Source: Angie Balata - HLRN PO (email: abalata@hlrn.org; website: http://www.hlrn.org)