Issues Home About Contact Us Issue 13 - October 2015 عربى
Editorial
Evaluation Criteria
If we were to look into the archives to review the Habitat Agenda and its accompanying “habitat debate,” we might encounter a strange sense of déjà-vu. In fact, that is what happens when we refer to any old issue of Habitat International Coalition’s HIC News published around the time of Habitat II. For example, HIC News More

Regional Developments
Sudan @ICESCR
The human rights dimensions of land form the central theme of a new parallel report on Sudan’s performance under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) that HIC-HLRN has submitted at Geneva in August 2015. HIC-HLRN coordinated with three Member organizations from Sudan to prepare the parallel report for the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural More

Egyptian Housing Rights Day: “Prevent and Remedy Forced Evictions”
The Egyptian Center for Civil and Legislative Reform (ECCLR) organized the annual Egyptian Housing Rights event on 6 September held each year to commemorate the rockslide in September 2008. This fourth commemoration of the annual event in 2015 was held under the slogan “Stop Forced Evictions.”It came amid the forced eviction process suffered by the shack dwellers at Dar es-Salaam More

Toward a Small-farmer Forum
One of the outcomes of the Housing and Land Rights Network’s Land Forums for Members and civil society actors is a broad recognition of the plight of small farmers and agricultural workers across the Middle East/North Africa (MENA) region. Besides the consequences of climate change that uniquely affect this region, small farmers in MENA share many other dire challenges and More

Habitat in Algeria: Unmet Promises and Diminished Obligations
Asprovided in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, Article 11, all States Parties are called upon to provide opportunities for person to realize the rights to food, clothing and shelter. Hence, the right to housing remains a condition upon which the realization of all other social rights depends, such as the rights to education or health, and More

Interpreting the Habitat Agenda in Egypt
CAIRO—In Egypt, a country with 50% of its population living in rural areas and relying on local natural resources for their livelihood, organizers of a forum in Cairo have continued to narrow the nearly forgotten Habitat Agenda to an exclusively urban focus. This reduction of the 40-year global Habitat Agenda, up for renewal next year, is consistent with UN-Habitat’s serial More

Making the Sahara Bloom
In March 2007, when I gave a fig sapling to a friend from USA, we transplanted it in the Salam English School yard, where she was teaching in the Sahrawi refugee camps near Tindouf, Algeria. We then talked about the problems of malnutrition here in the camps due to the lack of vitamins and minerals in the food basket that More

Egyptian NGOs, Thinking outside the Habitat III Box
One of the most-daunting challenges in the process toward the Third United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Human Settlement [Urban] Development (Habitat III) is sorting the mounds of information, knowledge and messaging from the diverse sources. Soon this articulation will form the broad contours of the New Habitat Agenda—what UN-Habitat is promoting as its “urban” agenda—to be adopted at More

Member News

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International Developments
Annual Meeting of the Global Network for the Right to Food and Nutrition
In July 2015, Habitat International Coalition took part in the annual meeting of the Global Network for the Right to Food and Nutrition (GNRtFN), held over three days in Kathmandu, Nepal, hosted byFIAN International and FIAN Nepal. The meeting was convened to bring together the partners of the Global Network for discussions, and strategizing future priorities and areas of work. As More

Priorities of the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty (IPC)
The Habitat International Coalition’s Housing and Land Rights Network (HIC-HLRN) always has worked in cooperation with important and strategic partners to advance the discourse and economic, social and cultural rights, in general, and to advance collective work on housing and land rights, in particular. Through strategic engagement within the processes related to international food governance, HIC is contributing to the More

World Bank Group’s Compliance and Land
Private sector investment affecting land in developing countries often leads to disputes between companies and local communities over land rights and land use. Since 1999, the private-sector arms of the World Bank Group (WBG)—the International Finance Corporation (IFC) and the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA)—have had an accountability mechanism to help address community grievances and disputes over environmental and social More

Reviewing Habitat III Issues
The substantive debate is now on and running in the current process leading to the 2016 Habitat III summit in October 2016. As an active stakeholder in that debate, Habitat International Coalition (HIC) has issued its compilation of inputs from Members and officers following their review of the Habitat III Issue Papers issued this summer. The 22 thematic contributions from More

European Movements Unite against Austerity
Athens—Greece, the modern European state most notoriously affected by austerity measures, hosted an International Meeting on the Right to Housing on 20–21 June 2015. The participants reviewed the common issues among European housing rights movements, especially in the Mediterranean Coast region, and shared strategies to restore housing rights to those whom European austerity policies have afflicted, especially by forced evictions. More

Human Rights and Local Government
On 22 September 2015, the United Nations Human Rights Council (Geneva) considered the final report of its Advisory Committee on the Role of local government in the promotion and protection of human rights. The report is the outcome of a two-year study on the subject by the Human Rights Council Advisory Committee and constitutes an important step More

 

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