Housing recognized as part of human rights

ISTANBUL, Turkey (JP): Negotiations on the issue of the right to housing ended Thursday afternoon with a victory for the U.S. delegation, which insisted that the right to housing is a component of human rights.

Johan Silas, a member of the Indonesian delegation, said yesterday that the debate on the right to housing had come to a conclusion.

"All (delegates) agreed that people have the right to decent housing, but this does not mean that the government has the obligation to provide housing for all people. The government, private sectors and communities should share in the responsibility of providing housing," he told journalists.

He said that the U.S. delegation had objected to a document's wording that the right to adequate housing is a human right because it was concerned that governments could be sued by people who required housing.

The City Summit Agenda, a special publication on the UN Conference on Human Settlements II, quoted the alternate head of the US delegation, Mike Stegman, as saying that the U.S. was "extremely pleased" with progress made by the informal working group on housing where - with the exception of wording contained in two brackets, which were referred back to the group -- agreement had been reached on paragraph 13.

The paragraph, contained in the preamble to the Habitat Agenda, is one of five documents which addresses housing rights. A compromise was reached after Canada came up with a draft designed to bridge the gap between the U.S. position, which was opposed to housing rights, and the European Union, which strongly supports them.

The compromise satisfies the U.S. delegation's bottom line that housing rights have to be "progressively realized". It also meets the U.S. condition that housing rights can only be recognized as long as they are acknowledged to be a component of other rights.

The words in brackets indicated whether countries "reaffirm their commitments" or "strive" to achieve those collective rights; and whether they "shall, should or will" be progressively achieved.

NGOs have complained that the language contained in the Habitat Agenda texts on the right to housing is too weak and that some points are missing.

They demanded that the Habitat Agenda clearly affirm the right to quality affordable and accessible housing as a legally enforced human right to be enacted in the Constitutions and legislation of all UN member states. They also demanded the affirmation on the obligation of national governments to commit sufficient resources to realize housing rights by immediate reallocation of funds away from weapons of war to build world habitats for peace.