Adequate Housing is Right of every woman, man, youth and child, says Special Rapporteur on World Habitat Day. The selection of Jakarta, Indonesia as the centre for this year’s World Habitat Day serves to highlight the enormous devastation and homelessness resulting from the 2004 tsunami. The recent Hurricane Katrina that hit the United States also exposed the lack of disaster-preparedness and failures in state response. Both the Asian tsunami and the Katrina disaster have revealed the grossly inadequate housing and living conditions under which historically marginalized groups, such as the African-American population in the United States and certain indigenous peoples in Indonesia and India have survived for decades.

Everyone's right to a secure place where to live in peace and dignity -strategic axis of the World Campaign for the Right to Housing prompted by HIC in the 90s- reaches today greater complexity and new dimensions in advance of the serious impacts of the economic globalization and the neo-liberal policies that prompt it.

Governor Sutiyoso has become infamous for his brutal and massive evictions of the houses of the urban poor and the confiscation of their means of livelihood like pedicabs and the goods and stalls of sidewalk vendors.

We cannot understand why UN Habitat gives this award to the City of Jakarta. The leading authorities are well known as example for the miss-use of the "city without slums"-approach. Cleaning the cities from the poor by evictions, excluding street vendors etc. is not what we understand by rights-based urban development.

With more than 3 billion people – one third of humanity – facing the prospect of living in slums by 2050 if present trends continue, Secretary-General Kofi Annan today dismissed evictions and demolitions as the answer, calling instead for pro-poor urban development.