WUNRN
COHRE - Centre on Housing Rights
& Evictions
WOMEN'S HOUSING RIGHTS ADVOCACY
8 June 2010 – COHRE today urged the UN Human Rights Council, currently meeting in Geneva, to encourage governments to tackle discrimination against women in housing issues.
COHRE
said that restitution programmes for women who have lost their homes due to
forced eviction should further gender equality – not further entrench women’s
exclusion from housing, land and property ownership.
In
many countries, women are discriminated against in ownership of land and
property titles. When restitution programs are implemented for victims of
forced eviction, women are often excluded, as such programmes do not always
challenge pre-existing gender hierarchies.
COHRE
also informed the Human Rights Council that women routinely face gender-based
violence in the context of forced evictions, and that remedying forced
evictions therefore requires multiple forms of reparations for women.
In
2009, the former Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women (Yakin Ertürk)
reported that, “The impact of … forced evictions, often by militia or armed
forces, is profoundly devastating for women and is correlated with heightened
rates of physical, psychological and economic violence against women before
during and after the evictions. This is true both in terms of violence against
women at the hands of state authorities, non-state actors, community members,
as well as violence against women by their partners or relatives within the
home.”
COHRE’s
own research has revealed similar patterns of gender-based violence and
targeted abuse against women.
COHRE
said that because of this pattern, women are sometimes referred to as the ‘soft
targets’ for forced eviction. In these cases, not only are women entitled to
restitution for lost housing, land and property, they are also entitled to
reparations because of gender-based violence perpetrated against them within
the context of forced eviction.
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