Right to housing: Difference between revisions
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[[File:Housing-is-a-human-right-graphic-No-Gods-No-Masters.png|thumb|right|350px|graphic from https://www.no-gods-no-masters.com]] ''"Right to housing" / "Housing is a human right" ''is a concept developed in national/international law and advocacy, particularly since the mid 20th century. <br/> <br/> Twitter search query link: [https://twitter.com/search?q=#right2housing%20OR%20#righttohousing&src=typed_query&f=live #right2housing OR #righttohousing]<br/>
== Socio-economic vs political/civil right? ==
from: Hohmann, Jessie. ''The Right to Housing: Laws, Concepts, Possibilities''. (2013), "Introduction":
"By virtue of its placement in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), the right to housing traditionally falls within the category known as social, economic and cultural rights. This designation seems firmly entrenched, despite the official position adopted by the United Nations and endorsed by most human rights practitioners, activists and academics that all human rights are indivisible, interdependent and interrelated. Moreover, indivisibility often remains in the realm of rhetoric, rather than appearing as a commitment to equal realisation, enforcement or attention for all human rights. The suggestion that housing is a right has been met with opposition, normally based on a perception that housing cannot fulfill the characteristics necessary for designation as a right. However, even when the indivisibility and interdependence of rights is taken seriously, important questions arise about whether diverse rights rest on different moral, legal and normative bases. If all rights are indivisible and interdependent, do economic, social and cultural rights continue to exist as a separate category of right, and if so, what is the signi cance of this categorisation or, if necessary, their further sub- categorisation as economic, social or cultural right?"
"the distinction between economic, social and cultural rights and other categories of rights remains highly relevant in a legal sense, due to differing obligations imposed on states through the ICESCR, for example, as opposed to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), or through the Revised European Social Charter (RESC) as contrasted with the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Such differing legal obligations illustrate Henry Shue’s argument that it is not the normative or moral basis of various rights that differ, but in fact the correlative duties to fulfill those rights."
from Hohmann (2019):
"The Right to Housing in International Law: Scope, Content, and Obligations
"Socio-economic rights, including the right to housing, are often perceived to be the poor cousins of the rights world. States and commentators sometimes argue they are merely moral exhortations, and their content is perceived to be vaguer than so-called civil and political rights, and thus obligations harder to define or enforce (Eide and Rosas, 2001 p. 3-7; Bates, 2007 p. 263-65). However, in the last 20 years, the content and scope of the right to housing in international law has been given a significant degree of specificity. This has occurred through the work of UN expert bodies, activists, advocates and scholars."
Article 2(1) of ICESCR, specifies state obligations:<blockquote>''"Each State Party to the present Covenant undertakes to take steps, individually and through international assistance and co-operation, especially economic and technical, to the maximum of its available resources, with a view to achieving progressively the full realization of the rights recognized in the present Covenant by all appropriate means, including particularly the adoption of legislative measures."'' </blockquote>"States have immediate obligations to ensure that every individual enjoys each element of the right to the level of a ‘'''minimum core'''’. For instance, street homelessness clearly violates the minimum core of the right, as do forced evictions (UNCESCR, 1997; UNCESCR, 1991); though in many respects the minimum core remains contested as a concept and difficult to apply in practice (Young, 2008)."
Young, Katharine G. (2008). "The Minimum Core of Economic and Social Rights: A Concept in Search of Content." ''The Yale Journal of International Law'', 33:113-175.
"The concept of the 'minimum core' seeks to establish a minimum legal content for the notoriously indeterminate claims of economic and social rights. By recognizing the “minimum essential levels” of the rights to food, health, housing, and education, it is a concept trimmed, honed, and shorn of deontological excess. It reflects a “minimalist” rights strategy, which implies that maximum gains are made by minimizing goals. It also trades rightsinflation for rights-ambition, channeling the attention of advocates towards the severest cases of material deprivation and treating these as violations by states towards their own citizens or even to those outside their territorial reach. With the minimum core concept as its guide, economic and social rights are supposed to enter the hard work of hard law.
"Yet rights-ambition is a difficult stance, and even minimalist ambitions can be misplaced. Critics of the concept have suggested that paring down such rights to an essential core threatens the broader goals of economic and social rights, or pretends a determinacy that does not exist. A long-standing criticism faults the minimum core for directing our attention only to the performance of developing states, leaving the legal discourse of economic and social rights beyond the reach of those facing material deprivation in the middle or high income countries."
== In International Law / UN treaty ==
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