Youth Movements, Uprising, and Housing and Land Rights

The crowds rising up in the Arab Spring have expressed their suffering from the lack of access to natural resources and the violation of their rights in adequate standard of living against a backdrop of increased corruption, repression and suppression of freedoms.

Land is the natural resource most subject corrupt practices and violations by various means, including biased legislation that serves dubious investment projects and outright expropriation. Additionally, defective policies and budgets for housing and development especially have deprived the youth from the means they need to subsist in future.

HIC-HLRN recently has sought to expand its human rights approach in housing and land issues to support youth movements in claiming their rights to resources as citizens of the state. HIC-HLRN harnesses its tools and potential to provide the information, capacity building and analysis to those engaged in that struggle. In that spirit, HIC-HLRN organized the third round of the Land Forum on “people’s sovereignty and self-determination” (Cairo, 15–17 January 2012), which affirmed the importance of youth participation with the rest of the community in reformulating state and local policies in compliance with the change that so many of the youth in the region demanded with their lives.

Enhancing knowledge and information, developing skills, networking, experience exchanges and training courses for youth are HIC-HLRN program objectives. International human rights norms and guidelines provide technical tools to promote and strengthen the struggles of youth movements to restore their rights to live in adequate standard of living, specifically, their housing and land rights.