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PREFACE
"The dwellers are summarily ejected and are expected to shift for themselves. They are paid a paltry vacating expense which carried them nowhere. Their occupation is gone. They have to build their cottages and search for their livelihood".
M.K. Gandhi
To be persistently threatened or actually victimized by the act of forced eviction from one’s home or land must surely be one of the most supreme injustices any individual, family, household or community can face. The perpetual insecurity of people intimidated by this practice, coupled with the frequent use of physical violence during the carrying out of this act, begin to reveal the personal and collective trauma invariably bestowed upon those faced with the prospect of forced eviction.
As the disaster of ‘ethnic cleansing' and other displacement in the former Yugoslavia, the bulldozing of 500,000 urban poor in the Sudan, the decimation of 1,500 Kurdish villages in southeastern Turkey, the mass eviction of over a million persons in China to build the world’s largest dam, the forced uprooting of over 100,000 dwellers from the barrios of the Dominican Republic, the forced displacement of tens of thousands tribal people from the Narmada Valley in India and numerous other cases of forced eviction so aptly reveal, this painful global phenomenon has neither decreased in scale nor in its callous and inhumane ruthlessness.
Forced evictions tend to involve competing socio-economic interests between the evictor and the evicted, invariably designed to benefit the most powerful group; eg. those supporting the eviction in question. Tolerated in most societies and officially encouraged in many, forced evictions dismantle what people have built up over month’s, years and sometimes decades, and destroy the livelihood, culture, community, families and homes of millions of people throughout the world every year. Far from creating solutions to housing crises, forced evictions destroy the dwellings and human settlements people call home, and could be perhaps more appropriately be labelled as a ‘de-housing’ policy rather than as anything even remotely resembling a constructive, human-oriented response to the ongoing global housing crisis.
While the forced removal of persons and groups from their homes against their will raises a lengthy series of human, social, economic and political considerations, this report will examine the practice primarily through the lens of international human rights law. Only recently has this legal domain begun to directly address forced evictions set within a human rights framework. As the following analysis will amply disclose, international human rights law has evolved an increasingly solid approach towards forced evictions; repeatedly equating the practice with ‘gross violations of human rights’.
While premised squarely upon the position taken on forced evictions under human rights law, this report has not been written in an overly legalistic manner and the legal issues addressed have been elaborated in an uncomplicated and accessible manner.
The preparation of this study originally began several years ago, in connection with the provision of a grant by the Netherlands Ministry of Housing, Planning and Environment (VROM), for which the author is grateful. The very extensive developments which have taken place during the past several years on the relationship between international law and forced evictions has made it imperative to fully revise earlier drafts of this document. In its present form, the report is current as of January 1995.
Scott Leckie
Utrecht, 10 January 1995
Introduction
On 10 March 1993 the United Nations Commission on Human Rights unanimously adopted resolution 1993/77 labelling forced evictions, wherever they may occur, as “a gross violation of human rights, in particular the right to adequate housing”.1 This momentous text also urged all governments to eliminate the practice of forced eviction and to confer legal security of tenure to all persons currently threatened with forced eviction.2
Although for the most part unnoticed by the world’s press, this timely and precedent-setting resolution enshrined what is an invariably obvious fact to the many tens of millions of persons who have faced this violation of human rights since the founding of the UN in 1945. While time will reveal how serious governments and other forces supporting the phenomenon of forced evictions take this and the many subsequent decisions embodying similar perspectives, the recognition that forced evictions constitute a practice inconsistent with human rights can no longer be ignored.
It goes without saying, however, that UN resolutions alone have rarely acted as powerful enough legal tools to alter the behaviour of governments. Consequently, illegal and unjust forced evictions continue to be carried out on a very large scale, affecting millions of persons annually, and are treated by many governments as routine and inevitable.
The traditional hesitance of most national and local governments, the UN Centre for Human Settlements (Habitat), various international institutions, and other relevant actors to acknowledge the magnitude and human dimensions of forced evictions is an indication of the types of strides required for forced evictions to actually become relegated to the history books.
As the analysis below will demonstrate, the worldwide eviction dynamic is anything but a past occurrence. Rather, this practice remains not only an almost habitual aspect of the so-called forces of ‘development’ in both urban and rural settings, but by any measurement exists disturbingly as a growing phenomenon; affecting increasing numbers of people and communities with each passing year.3
The Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE), for instance, estimated in August 1994 that a minimum of 5.4 million persons in 26 countries are currently threatened with …
1 For the full text of resolution 1993/77 in English, Spanish, French and Arabic, see: COHRE (June 1993) Sources #3: Forced Evictions and Human Rights: A Manual for Action, Utrecht, pp. 7-8.
2 Operative paras, 2 and 3 of Resolution 1993/77.
3 Substantiating this view, Hardoy and Satterthwaite have argued that: "If present trends continue, we can expect to find tens of millions more households living in squatter settlements or in very poor quality and overcrowded rental accommodation owned by highly exploitive landlords. Tens of millions more households will be forcibly evicted from their homes”. Hardoy and Satterthwaite (1989) Squatter Citizen: Life in the Urban Third World, Earthscan. London.
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