A/HRC/34/51 recognized as a fundamental human right rather than as a commodity. The present report takes up that challenge. II. Human rights framework 11. The right to adequate housing is, at its core, the right to a place to live in dignity and security. It is interdependent with other human rights, particularly the right to equality and non-discrimination and the right to life (see A/71/310). It is against those core human rights values that the actions of States in relation to financial actors and housing systems are to be assessed. 12. International and domestic financial institutions and markets are created and sustained by Governments and must be made accountable to States’ human rights obligations. Millions of foreclosures, evictions and displacements and more than a billion people living in grossly inadequate housing conditions and homelessness worldwide signal, among other things, the failure of States and of the international community to manage the interaction between financial actors and housing systems in accordance with the right to adequate housing. The absence of any effective human rights monitoring or accountability in that sphere also signals the underestimation on the part of Governments, international and national human rights bodies, domestic courts, lawyers and advocates of the role that domestic, regional and international human rights law could play as a framework for both regulating financial actors and engaging financial systems in the realization of the right to housing. 13. States’ human rights obligations are commonly categorized on the basis of a tripartite division of obligations to respect, protect and fulfil human rights. A State must respect the right to housing by refraining from taking any action that would violate that right, protect individuals and communities from violations of the right to housing by third parties and fulfil the right to adequate housing to the maximum of its available resources, with a view to achieving progressively its full realization by all appropriate means, including particularly the adoption of legislative measures. 9 The obligation to fulfil the right to housing includes adopting and implementing, in collaboration with stakeholders, strategies for the realization of the right to housing that clarify the responsibilities and roles of all levels of government, institutions and private actors, with goals, timelines, accountability mechanisms, appropriate budgetary allocations and measures to ensure access to justice.10 14. The tripartite obligations of States in relation to the management of financial markets and the regulation of private actors are often interpreted too narrowly. Under international human rights law, States’ obligations in relation to private investment in housing and the governance of financial markets extend well beyond a traditional understanding of the duty to simply prevent private actors from actively violating rights. The assumption, bolstered by neo-liberalism, that States should simply allow markets to work according to their own rules, subject only to the requirement that private actors “do no harm” and do not violate the rights of others, is simply not in accordance with the important obligation to fulfil the right to adequate housing by all appropriate means, including legislative measures. 15. The State must regulate, direct and engage with private market and financial actors, not simply to ensure that they do not explicitly violate rights, but also to ensure that the 9 10 See International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, art. 2 (1). See Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, general comment No. 4 (1991) on the right to adequate housing, paras. 11-15. 5