Welcome to Land Times

The Housing and Land Rights Network team welcomes you to this inaugural issue of Land Times, the new periodical newsletter of the HIC-HLRN’s Middle East/North Africa program. While this issue represents the beginning of a service to Members of Habitat International Coalition’s Housing and Land Rights Network and the concerned public, it also embodies a process begun already with the HLRN’s first regional Land Forum in May 2009. There participants committed to continue their focus on habitat rights and their pursuit of solutions to problems common to land and natural resource governance in their countries and in the region.

Since that earlier beginning, much of the landscape has changed. People across the great swath of countries of the southern Mediterranean have called en masse for fundamental change in governance. Some calls have been heeded, while others are the subject of continuing struggle and confrontation. However, what is clear to all living and observing these developments, much more and more-serious work is needed to institutionalize human rights-based governance and equitable management of natural resources in our countries.

This first Land Times reflects the work in progress and the challenges that remain ahead. Issue No. 1 is an inventory of the range and scope of the work that lies ahead to rectify policies, provide remedy and reparations to victims, and plot an equitable future where the use of land and habitat resources is fair, transparent, law based and meets the needs and rights of citizens. This collection of articles with their links to further information emphasizes the issues of the region: land reform; urban land access and use; land and natural resources in the context of conflict, occupation and war; legislative and constitutional reform; gender equity and discrimination; indigenous peoples’ rights; and civil society’s indispensible role in articulating human rights-based solutions.

These timely issues, while closely shared in our region, also reflect processes and challenges at the international level as well. Therefore, this Land Times follows a format that focuses on MENA “Regional News,” as well as covers the important developments coinciding at the global level as “International News.” In addition, each issue of Land Times is designed to be user friendly for busy readers, and carries a regular “Terminology Corner” that clarifies technical terms relevant to each edition.

The officers and Members of HIC-HLRN hope that this new vehicle for knowledge sharing will contribute to needed capacity building for people and communities to share in the responsibility of determining their own future, participating more effectively in policy formulation and monitoring, and, thus, exercising their self-determination as full citizens in democratic States.

HLRN Team
Cairo, January 2012