Issues Home About Contact Us Issue 10 - July 2014 عربى
Regional Developments

“The Cairo Coalition”: Toward a Civic Alliance on the Built Environment and the Human Right to Adequate Housing in Egypt

The housing sphere is one of the sectors most demonstrating the contradiction between human rights standards ratified by our governments and the concomitant injustice toward the majority of impoverished citizens that transpires on the ground. The state’s allocation of land to investors, to be sold to the highest bidder after construction, remains a driving force that afflicts millions of Egyptians deprived of their dignity, respect, justice, recognition of their tenure and prevents them from attaining and sustaining their access to adequate housing and livelihoods.

Amid work on a new Egyptian Constitution (2013), a group of organizations working in the field of housing have formed a practical alliance to direct their collective and respective efforts toward realizing the human right to adequate housing, despite the growing commodification of public and private lands and resources, and socially unregulated urban growth.

The group has formed an alliance under the broadly principled title “Urban Reform and the Human Right to Adequate Housing.” It is the same group that presented “An Urban Approach to the Constitution,” and is working to take the initiative to return policy decisions to the people and their representatives in defense of their own interests. Above all, this alliance calls for an elected and representative government at all levels of the state to manage the economic, social and cultural rights affairs of citizens and inhabitants. The coalition already has put forward alternative solutions as follows:

• Halt housing projects implemented by the state, and subject them to scrupulous evaluations, in order to determine those needy persons most eligible for housing, rather than turning over new, subsidized housing units to persons and groups on the basis of cronyism and nepotism.

• Involve affected residents in the planning of cities and areas where the state is seeking to transform them unilaterally under the slogan of “urban development.”

• Address housing as a human right, not a commodity.

• Advocate for a front of professionals, rights holders and victims of housing rights violations, in order to mobilize efforts to improve housing conditions in Egypt aligned with the norms of international agreements and the Constitution toward respect, protection and fulfillment of the human rights to land and housing.

• Cooperate with the competent authorities, reforming the United Nations Human Settlements Programme UN-HABITAT, and the Informal Settlement Development Fund (ISDF), and contributing to the formation of the new Ministry of Urban Development, and others, to upstream resolutions to housing and land-use problems with the obligated and responsible authorities, before the implementation of the decisions and plans that, as before, exacerbate social and economic problems.

• Provide knowledge, expertise and success stories from work with communities in the MENA region and beyond that have proved to resolve housing rights deficits.

This new coalition also builds on recent efforts jointly to assess Egypt’s implementation of Article 11 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, in Egypt’s 2013 review, the country’s Universal Periodic Review (2014), inputs to the UN Human Rights Council’s study on human rights and local government, and preparations for Habitat III (2016). These global processes offer the new coalition the occasion to demonstrate consistency of purpose, operationalization of human right to housing norms and a much-needed—direct or parallel—input into the process toward Egypt’s National Habitat III Report, which the state is obliged to submit for global review in preparation for the 2016 world Habitat III conference.

The “Cairo Coalition” combines the vision to address these many challenges. So far, it is a popular initiative without external support. However, it seeks like-minded partners to fortify and sustain this principles effort.

For further information, contact:

 

Rabie Wahba, Senior Program Officer

Middle East/North Africa Program

Habitat International Coalition – Housing and Land Rights Network


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