A/HRC/34/51 order to protect indigenous territories or environmental resources violated investors’ rights under bilateral investment treaties. 61 The Government of Mauritius is currently being taken to arbitration by a group of property development companies from the United Kingdom that invested in luxury real estate developments in Mauritius and are now seeking damages for a decision on the part of the Government to change its planning policy to restrict such developments.62 55. The mere threat of those kinds of claims can have a directive effect on State housing policy. Investment treaty arbitration frequently involves millions of dollars in damages, and thus acts as a disincentive for States to enact and enforce any regulatory measures restricting the profitability of housing or real estate assets purchased by foreign investors. Those whose right to adequate housing may have been infringed by States’ failures to regulate the activities and speculative profits of foreign investors, on the other hand, have few if any avenues of redress, and certainly no ability to seek damages in the amounts claimed by private investors. The imbalance in access to remedies creates an imbalance in State accountability and priorities. B. Domestic courts 56. Domestic adjudication in the area of housing and finance has also tended to protect investors and has been oriented towards enforcing the contractual relationship between lenders and creditors, both with individual households and with States, without considering imbalances in power or the implications for human rights of the means used for enforcing repayment.63 The right to adequate housing has rarely been referenced in the adjudication of foreclosures and subsequent evictions, although it is clearly at issue. 57. In some instances, courts have played an important role in holding financial institutions liable for predatory and discriminatory lending practices, albeit without reference to international human rights obligations. In a recent case, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals in the United States ruled in favour of a lawsuit brought by the city of Miami against Bank of America and Wells Fargo for discriminatory predatory lending practices linked to the mortgage crisis. 64 The Constitutional Court of South Africa recently considered a case involving a fraudulent scheme by investors and a finance company leading to hundreds of homeowners suffering losses of homes and savings. The Court rejected a claim by banks that would place responsibility on the homeowner for repayment of an unpaid debt due to the bank, holding that there is an obligation on the part of wellresourced powerful banking groups to check on the legality of what their clients are buying before lending money and earning interest on it.65 58. There is considerable variation and inconsistency, however, in the way mortgage or rental default is addressed in domestic law and enforced by courts. In many jurisdictions, 61 62 63 64 65 16 See Michael Ballantine and Lisa Ballantine v. Dominican Republic, Notice of arbitration and statement of claim, 11 September 2014, and Álvarez and Marín Corporación S.A. and others v. Panama (2015), International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) case No. ARB/15/14. See Thomas Gosling and others v. Republic of Mauritius (2016), ICSID case No. ARB/16/32. See Lauren E. Willis, “Introduction: why didn’t the courts stop the mortgage crisis?”, Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review, vol. 43, No. 4 (January 2010), and Ada Colau and Adrià Alemany, Mortgaged Lives: From the housing bubble to the right to housing (Journal of Aesthetics & Protest Press, Los Angeles, Leipzig and Lon, 2014), pp. 165-167. See City of Miami v. Bank of America Corp, in The United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, case No. 14-14543. See Absa Bank Limited v. Moore and Another (CCT 03/16), Constitutional Court of South Africa.