A/HRC/19/53 19. At the international level, the newly created UN-Women, the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, has incorporated a specific goal on increasing women‘s access to economic empowerment and opportunities. This focus seeks, inter alia, to promote the adoption and implementation of laws and policies that expand women‘s economic assets and security, including laws and policies to guarantee equal access to land and property. 11 In addition, the recently created Working Group on the issue of discrimination against women in law and practice has been tasked by the Human Rights Council with promoting and exchanging views on best practices related to the elimination of laws that discriminate against women or are discriminatory to women in terms of implementation or impact. Doing so will contribute to ending gender discrimination in all parts of the world, as well as to ending systemic violations of women‘s right to adequate housing. 20. In addition, the most recent concluding observations adopted by the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women on Israel for the first time made explicit reference to women‘s ―right to adequate housing.‖ 12 In those concluding observations, the Committee also for the first time made explicit reference to the practice of ―forced evictions‖, urging Israel to ―revoke its policies allowing for and refrain from the practice of forced eviction and house demolitions, which negatively impact on the physical and psychological well-being as well as the development and advancement of Palestinian and Israeli Arab women.‖13 These recommendations help to conceptually link the contents of general comments 4 (1991) on the right to adequate housing and 7 (1997) on forced evictions of the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights to the nondiscrimination and equality protections guaranteed under the Covenant. 21. One area in which new policies adopted in recent years have increasingly protected women‘s right to adequate housing is within the context of domestic violence. 14 In Europe, for example, the Commissioner for Human Rights of the Council of Europe issued a recommendation on the implementation of the right to housing in 2009, advocating the adoption and implementation of national housing strategies by all Council of Europe member States.15 Section 4.3.6. of the recommendation deals explicitly with women and women victims of violence, calling upon States ―to protect women victims of violence through specific legal and policy initiatives including the provision of specialized emergency shelters and other alternative housing.‖ 16 Section 5 also urges States to adopt national housing strategies that ―apply a gender perspective, identify disadvantaged and vulnerable groups and include positive measures for ensuring their effective enjoyment of the right to housing,‖17 and also to ―adopt anti-violence provisions in housing legislation 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 UNW/2011/9, para. 40. CEDAW/C/ISR/CO/5, paras. 28-29. Ibid. para. 29(a). The former United Nations Special Rapporteur on violence against women noted in her 2000 report (E/CN.4/2000/68/Add.5) that ―Housing policy is directly related to issues of violence against women …. Lack of shelter facilities forces up to 30 per cent of women who have fled domestic violence to return to their homes and thus to violence.‖ See also: United Nations Division for the Advancement of Women, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Handbook for Legislation on Violence Against Women (New York, 2010). Council of Europe, Recommendation of the Commissioner for Human Rights on the implementation of the right to housing (CommDH(2009)5) (Strasbourg, 2009). Ibid., section 4.3.6. Ibid., section 5.5. 7