Call to Publicly Denounce Violations of Housing and Land Rights

The Urban Social Forum Organizing Committee invites all social groups and organizations that wish to speak out against a specific violation of housing or land rights, caused either by eviction or land grabbing, to participate in the “Eviction and Land Grabbing Tribunal“, on September 3 in Naples, Italy.

Logistics: The event will take place on September
3 from 6pm to 8pm at the Fiera d’Oltremare esplanade, the main venue of UN-Habitat’s
World Urban Forum. Raquel Rolnik, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right
to Adequate Housing, will also participate in this event. For more information
about her work, please visit www.righttohousing.org.

Goal: To
provide organizations and social groups – both those in attendance and those
following the tribunal through the internet – a platform from which they can
submit their complaints directly to the United Nations and to governments and
businesses around the world responsible for evictions and land-grabbing.

Development: Participants will hold a
demonstration in which they will display banners which contain photos and the
main aspects of cases they wish to denounce (click here to see an example banner). A representative of each case will be asked to take the stage
to say a few words regarding their denunciations. The cases presented can be ones
that have already been documented (for example, those included in the 2011
Campaign for the Right to Habitat or those included in the “World Map of Urban
Habitat” organized by Habitat et Participation) or can be more
recent local cases.

Conditions for participation: Organizations that wish to participate
in this event must send the requested information below to gs@hic-net.org before August 22. The
Organizing Committee will respond by email with instructions for preparing
posters and with more specific information about the event (meeting place,
coordination, etc.)

Requested information