A/HRC/40/61 I. Introduction: the housing crisis as a crisis in access to justice 1. An estimated 1.8 billion people lack adequate housing. Twenty-five per cent of the world’s urban population live in informal settlements. Homelessness and forced evictions are on the rise in virtually every country. In the United States of America, over 2 million households are evicted from their homes every year – 4 per minute.1 These numbers reflect the global crisis in access to adequate housing, but they also reveal a global crisis in access to justice for the right to housing. When the capacity exists to eliminate widespread homelessness and inadequate housing, the only explanation for their persistence at current levels is that States and other actors have failed to recognize housing as a human right. The denial of access to justice is the embodiment of that failure. The right to access to justice is “fundamental to the very notion of human rights”. 2 To be a rights holder, and for housing to be treated as a fundamental human right, one must be able to claim rights, to give voice and context to the deprivation of dignity and rights experienced. 2. Violations of the right to housing are as much failures in the administration of justice as they are failures of housing programmes. If those living in inadequate housing and in homelessness have no access to justice, they are deprived of agency to bring violations to light, to address root causes or ensure appropriate responses. They are unable to challenge the policy choices and decisions that created the conditions in which they live. 3. Housing is the aspect of peoples’ lives that is most likely to engage the need for access to justice. Yet access to justice for the right to housing is commonly ignored. In a survey of 45 countries by the World Justice Project, the most common issues identified by respondents in which access to justice was needed were overwhelmingly related to housing.3 When the same project assesses States’ performance in providing access to justice for fundamental human rights, however, the right to housing is not among the human rights considered.4 In the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the targets and indicators for access to justice under Goal 16 do not consider any aspect of access to justice for the right to housing. The Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights have been applied to the responsibilities of businesses to ensure access to effective remedies, but residential housing – the world’s largest business – has been almost entirely ignored. 4. Ensuring access to justice for the right to housing must therefore challenge dominant notions of what access to justice entails. The inquiry must begin by asking what kind of justice is needed for the right to housing to be vindicated. The procedural and practical barriers facing potential rights claimants seeking access to courts and tribunals must be addressed, and so too must substantive barriers stemming from inadequate protection of the right to housing afforded by existing laws and by the prevailing interpretation and application of those laws within courts. Courts and tribunals are more often experienced by those who are living in informal settlements or homelessness as places where evictions are ordered or criminalizing sanctions imposed, rather than as venues where the right to housing can be claimed. 5. There have, however, been historic advances in access to justice for the right to housing in recent years that provide the foundations for a new and transformative approach. At the international level, the right to housing has been the subject of precedent-setting adjudication by the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. At the national level, the right to housing has been at the centre of emerging socioeconomic rights jurisprudence. And at the local level, advocacy for meaningful accountability for the right 1 2 3 4 See https://evictionlab.org/national-estimates/. These estimates represent only rental evictions ordered by courts and mortgage foreclosures. A/HRC/25/31, para. 2; see also A/63/275 paras. 48–67. World Justice Project, Global Insights on Access to Justice: Findings from the World Justice Project General Population Poll in 45 Countries (Washington, D.C., 2018). The dominance of housing issues is clear if issues of housing title and access to water and sanitation are combined in the responses. See https://worldjusticeproject.org/our-work/wjp-rule-law-index/wjp-rule-law-index2017%E2%80%932018/factors-rule-law/fundamental-rights-factor. 3