A/HRC/41/51 Kingdom alone.27 The high success rate (72 per cent) certainly encourages this worrying tendency. Since the 1990s, the percentage of debt crises involving litigation has grown from 10 per cent to almost 50 per cent. 28 30. Africa has been by far the most harassed region, with an average of eight cases filed every year. Not for nothing African countries have the lowest rate of winning cases and have disbursed more than 70 per cent of the nearly $1 billion awarded to vulture funds as a result of lawsuits.29 It is against that backdrop that some specific initiatives to protect States receiving funds from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank have developed.30 31. Remarkably, the African Legal Support Facility, established by the African Development Bank in 2008, provides legal support and technical advice to States facing lawsuits launched by vulture funds. 31 In 2006, the Commonwealth secretariat set up an “HIPC legal clinic” to assist States in the negotiation and renegotiation of foreign debt. Despite the fact that information on the implementation of those programmes is not available, the evidence is that vulture funds are progressively changing their business focus from heavily indebted poor countries to middle-income countries and territories, such as Greece, Puerto Rico and the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. 32 32. In other countries particularly hit by the financial crisis, such as Ireland or Spain, vulture funds are developing speculative strategies in relation to non-performing private loans.33 In that context, their strategy is quite similar: they acquire distressed real estate assets, taking advantage of the difficulties people are having to repay their loans to the banks and wait until the mortgage is in default. In such a way, vulture funds progressively get a dominant position in the housing market that ends by allowing them to influence rents and house prices. Speculation drives up property costs and makes housing unaffordable for low-income households. In a letter sent to Blackstone Group L.P., the world’s largest private equity firm, United Nations human rights experts expressed concerns about the grave impact that the “financialization” of housing was having on the enjoyment of the right to adequate housing for millions of people across the world. 34 V. National legislation 33. At present, only three countries, Belgium, France and the United Kingdom, have enacted some sort of legal framework to discourage disruptive litigation initiated by vulture funds. Attempts to enact similar initiatives in the United States have failed so far. 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 8 This number does not include litigation resulting from bilateral investment treaties or before international arbitration bodies, which are increasingly being used by vulture funds to deploy their strategies. See Schumacher, Trebesch and Enderlein, “Sovereign defaults in court”, p. 2. African Legal Support Facility, “Medium term strategy 2013–2017”, p. 10. Currently, 36 States are classified as heavily indebted poor countries, i.e., countries with high poverty levels that are eligible for financial assistance from IMF and the World Bank. In 2017, seven African States among them were facing commercial litigation, IMF factsheet, “Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative and Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative (MDRI). Statistical Update” September 2017, p. 45. As of January 2016, the facility consists of 52 States, African States and others (Belgium, Brazil, France, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom) and 7 international organizations. In 2010, the Management Board approved support for the first case involving vulture fund litigation against the Democratic Republic of the Congo. See Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt, “Fonds Vautours. Les Ailes de la Dévastation (2017). See, for example, Michael Byrne, “From Puerto Rico to the Dublin docklands; vulture funds and the global South”, Debt and Development Coalition Ireland (2016) and Luis Doncel, “Los fondos buitre reinan en España”, El Pais (21 April 2018). In Ireland, 60 per cent of all assets sold by one of the banks have been acquired by Texas-based Lone Star Capital. See OHCHR, “States and real estate private equity firms questioned for compliance with human rights” (26 March 2019).