World Summit on Sustainable Development Department of Public Information - News and Media Services Division - New York
	Johannesburg, South Africa 26 August-4 September 2002	28 August 2002

PRESS CONFERENCE BY HOUSING SPECIAL RAPPORTEUR   People around the world were living in slums, squatter settlements, old buses, shipping containers, elevator enclosures and tin shelters and ensuring their right to adequate housing was a first step towards encouraging regeneration and protection of the environment, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights' Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing said today at a Summit press conference. Yet, added Miloon Kothari, the Summit was not fully embracing the human rights approach. The outcome texts of the Summit must recognize the essential links between those millions of dwellers and their profound dependence and impact on the environment, particularly in developing countries and countries in transition.. Failure to grasp the enormous potential of that approach to sustaining the environment and promoting development would only lead to much larger scales of dispossession and homelessness around the world. The problem of housing, of human settlements, was one of the gravest faced by the world today, he said. Some 600 million urban dwellers lived in overcrowded, poor housing, without water or electricity, and 1 billion lived under those conditions in rural areas. As for the kind of international interventions necessary, it was vital to build upon the principle of international cooperation -- that was a question of fraternity between the developed and developing worlds. The notion of solidarity must be used by States to introduce policies aimed at reducing global warming, grappling with natural and man-made disasters, and so forth. But, that was not the type of international cooperation being stressed at the Summit. It was quite disturbing, for example, that any mention of children had been omitted in the draft outcome texts. Those and other groups bore the brunt of inadequate and insecure housing. Having just attended the round-table discussion on water, he said there had been a recognition that water should be treated as a human right, but very little discussion about how that would be done. Consensus was far from being reached on recognition of such issues as human rights, even on a rhetorical level, because once those were deemed human rights, there were very specific commitments States needed to make. The role of the State in the context of human rights was very different from the role of the State being discussed at the Summit. The human rights approach must be integrated, honestly and forthrightly, he stressed. Among the problems he saw at the Summit thus far was the absence of any attempt to build upon agreed commitments. Rather, he was seeing a backtracking from earlier agreed commitments. For example, a paragraph under contention in the draft institutional framework on human rights had elicited suggestions to delete it altogether. There was also disagreement on the paragraph concerning women's rights to land and inheritance. It was hard to imagine moving in the direction of a world where poverty would be reduced if women were not afforded land and inheritance rights. Asked for elaboration on which countries or groups of countries were willing to accept specific declarations on human rights and which were just trying to water them down, Mr. Kothari said some countries were asking why it was necessary to recognize human rights in the section on institutional framework when human rights were already mentioned at the beginning of the text. That was a weak position, because the preamble was not binding in any way. He sought concrete references to human rights in the implementation plan. Expressing surprise that there was not a regional group support for those paragraphs, he said that was inconsistent with the position those groups had taken in other United Nations forums on human rights. When it came to the political resolution of a document, a lot of compromises were being made, so the signal sent out to those around the world struggling for human rights was "very, very negative".   Press Conferences Summit News