6
October 2008
The following statement was issued in Geneva by the
Special Rapporteur of the Human Rights Council on adequate housing, Raquel
Rolnik, on the occasion of World Habitat Day .
"Can we celebrate today World Habitat Day with joy
and hope?"
This year's theme is "Harmonious Cities." Are
the world cities heading towards harmony? One of every three city dwellers
lives in a slum. The growth of slums in the last 15 years has been
unprecedented. Today there are approximately 998 million slum dwellers in the
world. UN-HABITAT estimates that if current trends continue. They will be 1.4
billion by 2020.
Living in slums means being deprived of access to adequate
sanitation, education, and health care or to other services and
opportunities. It also means being excluded from full participation in civic
life and the exercise of citizen's rights, as slums are considered illegal,
informal or transitory and in any case a non-permanent part of a city's
political and economic fabric. Many urban and housing policies in developed
as well as in developing countries, under democratic or authoritarian
regimes, seek to bring "harmony" to the city by evicting the poor
from the better-resourced urban areas.
Mass evictions from slums and squatter settlements in
various cities in recent years suggest that security of tenure is becoming
increasingly precarious. Evictions are often carried out to make room for
large-scale infrastructure or city "beautification" programmes.
Many of these evictions are carried out without legal notice or due process.
They ignore the right to adequate housing of every human being. They fail to
recognize that harmony without inclusiveness is deceptive and cannot be
sustained.
The global observance of this year World Habitat Day is
led from the Angolan capital, Luanda. Angola, like other countries, faces
today a tremendous challenge. Sub-Saharan Africa is the region of the world
where slums and urban growth rates are the highest in the world representing
4.53 per cent and 4.58 per cent per year respectively.
When it became independent in 1975, Luanda had a
population of 500,000. During the civil war, 3.5 million displaced persons
found refuge in slums around Luanda in precarious living conditions, without
access to basic services. Today, very few of them want to return to their
land, marked by the memory of hunger and the forced enrolment of their
children by parties to the conflict.
Today Angola earns billion of dollars selling diamonds and
oil. But for most of the population of the slums of Luanda, oil is only the
liquid they use in their lamps, as most households do not have access to
electricity. A master plan for the reconstruction of the country's
infrastructure, completely destroyed by the conflict, is being implemented by
the Government. Among various initiatives, a project of urban renewal for
Luanda Bay tries to attract private investment.
Angola has gone through an electoral process to
consolidate peace and democracy. An important task now is to include all
slums inhabitants as full citizens, respecting their rights and desire to
stay and improving their settlements towards adequate housing conditions. For
Angola, Habitat Day and its celebration is an opportunity to affirm the
commitment of the elected government to integrate and implement the right to
adequate housing in national and local legislation and policies.
For the world, it is a day to reflect how much an
exclusionary pattern of urban development negatively impacts harmony, peace
and human rights for all.
Further information on the mandate and work of the Special
Rapporteur on adequate housing can be found at http://www2.ohchr.org/english/issues/housing/index.htm
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