The OHCHR issued, in 2002, a publication called Housing rights legislation: Review of international and national legal instruments. This research report was prepared to promote global understanding of the linkages between housing and human rights. Its focus is on housing law and how it can be used by States and the international community to address the problems of homelessness, forced evictions and housing deprivation from a human rights perspective.
Housing rights are unmistakably part of international human rights law. The right to adequate housing is embedded in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and major international human rights treaties such as the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.
In a world where more than one billion people continue to live in inadequate housing conditions, the imperative of renewed attention to the realization of housing rights takes on added urgency. Under international human rights law, Governments have legal responsibilities to “take steps by all appropriate means” to ensure the full and progressive realization of the human right to adequate housing. Such domestic measures include, although are not limited to, legislative action.
The report illustrates that effective constitutional and legislative guarantees of the right to adequate housing are not only realistic but have already been adopted successfully in a number of countries with diverse legal, social, economic and cultural systems.
To read other OHCHR publications on the right to adequate housing, click here.
To download the research report, click on the green button below.
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