A/HRC/43/43/Add.1 persons with disabilities. The Act also establishes the National Commission for Persons with Disabilities, which is responsible for ensuring that persons with disabilities have access to housing, education and health care. The Commission will be empowered to receive complaints of violations and support victims to seek legal redress. 69. Despite normative progress, persons with disabilities still face arbitrary arrests and imprisonment, stigma, violence and discrimination in most aspects of life, including health care, housing and education. 65 The Special Rapporteur heard appalling testimonies of inhumane disregard for the dignity of persons with disabilities. According to a number of accounts, persons with disabilities are commonly arrested indiscriminately and transferred to “rehabilitation centres” that are tantamount to the poorest prisons, with overcrowded rooms, deplorable conditions, lack of access to showers and insufficient food. The Special Rapporteur was informed that residents contract preventable diseases such as tuberculosis and often die prematurely while in the centres. Witnesses claimed being discarded “like waste”. One victim told the Special Rapporteur that he had been sent to a rehabilitation centre in 1980. He had been denied regular access to showers, had been provided with limited quantities of food and had been physically restrained with chains for an entire year. As he had no money to bribe officials in order to leave, he had to escape. 70. Between 2003 and 2007, persons with disabilities begging on the streets of Abuja were forced to leave the centre and were “evacuated” to Karamajiji, in the outskirts of the city. The forced eviction led to the creation of a colony, home to hundreds of persons with physical, intellectual and psychosocial disabilities. When the Special Rapporteur visited the colony, the housing conditions were utterly inadequate, comparable to other informal settlements. Improvised shacks offered little protection from the elements and their inhabitants lived on dirt floors and had no access to running water or electricity. The lack of paved roads and properly graded ramps made it particularly difficult for residents in wheelchairs or on crutches to move around. Despite the deplorable housing conditions, the community was vibrant, benefiting from an internal atmosphere of acceptance, and seemed cohesive in terms of residents’ attempts to assist each other, although most indicated that they could not earn a livelihood and thus could not upgrade their own housing conditions. Access to education and health care was severely limited. VII. Access to justice 71. According to the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, States must offer an accessible, affordable, timely and effective remedy, either judicial or administrative, to persons whose right to housing has been violated. 66 The Committee has also stated that a rigid classification of economic, social and cultural rights, putting them beyond the reach of the courts, is arbitrary and incompatible with the indivisibility and interdependence of human rights. It also hinders the capacity of the courts to protect the rights of the most vulnerable and disadvantaged groups in society. 67 72. In Nigeria, however, the Constitution creates a hierarchy of rights privileging civil and political rights over socioeconomic rights, which renders the latter non-justiciable in court. Although section 16 (2) (d) of the Constitution mandates the State to provide adequate shelter for all, section 6 (6) (c) restricts the courts from adjudicating on those matters. 73. While the constitutional protection of the right to housing is inadequate, forced evictions often violate a wide array of other rights protected in the Constitution, such as the right to physical security and to freedom from cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. 68 This has allowed victims of forced evictions to successfully claim in court that forced evictions in which no alternative accommodation is provided violate the Constitution. In 65 66 67 68 16 www.hrw.org/news/2019/01/25/nigeria-passes-disability-rights-law. Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, general comment No. 9 (1998) on the domestic application of the Covenant, para. 9. Ibid, para. 10. A/HRC/4/18, annex I, para. 6.