Struggling against Impunity

The Annual Report of Findings from the HIC-HLRN Violation Database (VDB), issued on this World Habitat Day (World Housing and Land Rights Day) 2012, focuses on the persistence of impunity for gross violations of housing and land rights. This year’s analysis draws on the cases entered in the HLRN Violation Database over the usual four-year span, and complements the reports of previous years on the trends in violations of housing and land rights across the globe.

By the time that the UN Commission on Human Rights affirmed, in 1993, that “the practice of forced evictions constitutes a gross violations of human rights, in particular the right to adequate housing,” the already-codified human right to adequate housing was further defined in the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights’ General Comment No. 4. The practice of forced eviction on a grand scale also may be classified as a crime against humanity and, in war time, as a war crime. Nonetheless, the practice continues in a variety of contexts and in all regions without the requisite reparations for the victims and without accountability of those who carried it out.

HLRN reports a range of violations, including forced eviction, dispossession, destruction and violations arising from privatization of public housing and other goods and services. The composite of these violations recorded in the VDB indicate that at least 51,486,712 persons remain victims during the review period, while forced eviction alone presently afflict at least 18,488,825 persons.

Of all of the 289 cases registered in the VDB during 2009–12, none has seen the authors of such gross violations come to justice. Although the cases include the partial accountability in a case cited from Egypt for a gross violation by way of destruction (and manslaughter) through negligence, the perpetrators of grand-scale violations through Israel’s wanton 2009 destruction of homes and displacements in the Gaza Strip of Palestine and the evictions resulting from foreclosures in the recent mortgage crisis continue to enjoy complete impunity. That impunity prevails as the violations remain ongoing, not least amid the continuing blockade of Gaza. Likewise, no one has been accountable for the homelessness, despite over eight million children affected in the United States alone.

On the brighter side, the VDB also records cases of exemplary efforts by HLRN partners at documentation and quantification of losses, costs and damages due to displacement and eviction, which form the basis for reparation claims. While these cases have succeeded to illustrate how forced evictions deepen poverty, they still have a way to go before the perpetrators face justice for their gross violations crimes against impoverished, occupied and vulnerable inhabitants. Deterrence of these practices forms a more long-term aim in the struggle.

As the mounting unrest resulting from these violations, as reported in the 2011 HLRN annual report from the VDB, the example of China is highlighted this year to show how rural people all over the globe are targeted for dispossession. The costs remain untold.

On this World Habitat Day (World Housing and Land Rights Day), we renew the call to justice for these violations, including reparations for their victims. By documentation and resistance, we renew the struggle against impunity.