The Special Rapporteur has recently launched a web platform to discuss, among other themes, women’s housing and land rights. With the help of a global coordinator and focal points hired to coordinate the outreach in the seven different regions (North America, Latin America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East and North Africa), the e-consultation aims to identify and make visible the different issues which women are currently facing throughout the world in relation to housing and land, to give us a fresh picture on the current state of these rights globally.
The virtual debate has been dynamic and has helped to identify some of the most pressing issues for women’s housing and land rights today. From women’s housing rights within the context of domestic violence and HIV/AIDS, to lack of access to justice and lack of rights awareness, the discussions have surfaced a range of critical issues.
A few central themes have been clear. One of them is how, even in places where good laws may exist, discriminatory social and customary norms continue to hinder the enjoyment of women’s housing and land rights. One participant from Ghana noted how “… Customary laws have greater influence than statutory law when it comes to women’s housing and land rights. Some of these customary laws effectively deprive women of property rights, particularly land and housing rights ….” A participant from Macedonia similarly said “Our society still [has] a big influence from the traditional and patriarchal values, so the women can very hardly become owners of property. In some areas the tradition of transferring the property only to the male child is still present.”
In both urban and rural areas, lack of access to adequate housing is a serious problem for women across the world. Women living in urban slums are particularly vulnerable to forced evictions, as are women living in conflict affected areas or under occupation. One participant from the Occupied Palestinian Territory who works with women who have lost their homes wrote about how “After the demolition, most of the burden of keeping the family together falls on the women. They have to make sure a meal is prepared when the entire kitchen was lost. They are responsible for making sure the children are taken care of both physically and emotionally.
The impact of the global financial crisis has also emerged as a major theme. Participants from the United States of America and Spain, for example, shared their concern on the foreclosure crisis and the lack of affordable housing and its disproportionate impact on poor women and their families. Those hit the hardest have been those women already most marginalized, including poor women, minority women, indigenous women, disabled women and women heading their households by themselves.
All of this shows how addressing women’s housing rights is still as critical as ever, and that progress in achieving these rights has been too slow. There is an urgent need for governments to move beyond ‘gender neutral’ housing policy, to adopting proactive legislative and policy measures explicitly recognizing women’s housing and land rights so that these rights can be enjoyed in practice.
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