Opinion

Bedroom tax is a human rights issue

Published in Friday September 13th, 2013 In In the media

The Guardian It really comes to something when the UN special investigator on housing, more familiar with shanty towns and favelas, has expressed herself so fiercely on the subject of the UK bedroom tax. “I was very shocked to hear how people really feel abused in their human rights by this decision and why – being so vulnerable – they should pay for the cost of the economic downturn, which was brought about by the financial crisis,” said Raquel Rolnik.

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The New Flood Insurance Disaster

Published in Friday August 30th, 2013 In Opinion

There was no question that the nation’s troubled flood insurance program needed an overhaul when Congress passed legislation last year to eliminate many of the subsidies that had put the program about $25 billion into debt. But these reforms offered too much tough love and too little compassion for flood-prone homeowners.

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Financial crises should not become human rights crises

Published in Wednesday July 10th, 2013 In Opinion

The financial crisis in itself is not what we all are concerned about. In fact, we could make the case that crises are just inherent to capitalism. The problem began when the financial crisis turned into a human rights crisis. We must pay try to understand and respond to the material and ideological underpinnings of this transformation.

A Housing Solution Gone Awry

Published in Monday June 3rd, 2013 In Opinion

In the early 1970s, the architect and city planner Oscar Newman came forth with a book and theory called “Defensible Space,” which relied in part on data from New York City public housing to propose a set of design solutions to the mounting problems of urban living.

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State must fix mortgage crisis plan and make it work

Published in Monday May 20th, 2013 In Opinion

In the EU, new mortgage laws are on the horizon. They claim it will make the mortgage process more transparent, but it will make the borrower a target should anything go wrong. And it could remove the one-year freeze on banks moving in on distressed homeowners. Instead, they could act within 30 days. It was always about saving the banks. The borrowers don’t matter.

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Come Grab Our Land

Published in Friday April 26th, 2013 In Opinion

Bordered by a rubber plantation in the west, a forestry plantation in the east and a palm oil farm in the south, the 18 local communities that live in Ocean Division, southern Cameroon, have had an uphill struggle for the rights to their land. In 2008, the government leased much of their forestland, about 47,000 hectares, to international company United Forest Cameroon.
But only through a sustained campaign and involvement by the Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI), a global coalition of organisations working to encourage forestland tenure, the communities were given back some of their land by a February 2012 prime ministerial decree.

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Safeguarding land rights: An opportunity for the World Bank to lead

Published in Monday April 15th, 2013 In Opinion

At the start of the Annual World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty this week, World Bank President Dr. Jim Kim made some welcome remarks about the global land rights crisis. He did not respond directly to the withering criticism of the role the Bank has played in promoting land grabs. But he did say that the Bank shares the concerns about the risks of large-scale land acquisitions, and importantly he acknowledged that “additional efforts must be made to build capacity and safeguards related to land rights and to empower civil society to hold governments accountable.”

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Myanmar’s ‘worrying’ transition

Published in Monday March 18th, 2013 In Opinion

Myanmar’s icon of democracy, Aung San Suu Kyi, has let down people protesting for land rights, saying she wasn’t in politics for popularity. Scott Leckie, director of the Switzerland-based NGO Displacement Solutions, has worked on Myanmar’s human rights issues for more than 25 years and tells DW about the country’s concerning developments.

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Why Are We Funding Abuse in Ethiopia?

Published in Monday March 18th, 2013 In Opinion

In 2010, the Ethiopian government began moving thousands of people out of the rural villages where they had lived for centuries to other areas several hours’ walk away. The Ethiopian government calls this program the “Commune Center Development Plan and Livelihood Strategy” and claims it is designed to bring scattered rural populations closer to schools, health clinics, roads, and other public services. But the Commune Center program has been marked by a string of human rights abuses linked to government attempts to clear huge tracts of land for foreign investors. According to testimony collected by Human Rights Watch and other groups over the past two years, the relocations have involved beatings, imprisonment, torture, rape, and even murder. In many of the new “villages” the program has created, the promised services do not exist. Deprived of the farms, rivers, and forests that once provided their livelihoods, many people fear starvation, and thousands have fled to refugee camps in Kenya and South Sudan.

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Domestic Violence, Housing, and a Human Rights Win for U.S. Women

Published in Monday March 11th, 2013 In In the media

March 8 is International Women’s Day, and it’s especially timely for us in the U.S. this year. The recent enactment of legislation reauthorizing and strengthening the Violence Against Women Act is a landmark event for women, and especially low-income women, in the U.S.

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