African Housing ministers meeting in Kenya: Time to show commitment to addressing housing crisis in Africa
Amnesty International, the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions, the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights and
Hakijamii Trust are calling on African housing ministers currently meeting in Nairobi, Kenya, to show commitment to
addressing the housing crisis in Africa.
A coalition spokesperson said at a media conference in Nairobi today,
"Africa is at a crossroads on the housing issue. Sub-Saharan Africa has the fastest rate of urbanisation in the world
and governments cannot solve the problem with brutal forced evictions that violate human rights, as we have seen in
Zimbabwe, Angola and recently in Kenya."
The African Ministerial Conference on Housing and Urban Development
(AMCHUD) meets today and tomorrow in Nairobi to discuss strategies for realising the Millennium Development Goals
relating to slums. However, civil society and experts have been excluded from the meeting, calling into question the
commitment of African ministers to work with other stakeholders to ensure everyone can enjoy their internationally
recognized right to adequate housing.
"The ministerial meeting in Nairobi provides a good opportunity for
African states to pronounce themselves opposed to forced evictions, to develop human rights based strategies such as
policies and laws to prevent forced evictions, instigate slum upgrading and provide serviced land for the poor and
access to basic services, and to learn best practices from each other. But The ministers need to work with other
stakeholders to achieve this," said a coalition spokesperson.
The coalition pointed to some good examples from Africa. For example,
Kenya is adopting guidelines to prevent and remedy forced evictions,
Botswana has developed certificates of occupancy to ensure secure tenure for residents of informal settlements, and
South Africa has developed legislation that provides for a rights-based approach to evictions and has enabled victims to
challenge forced evictions in the courts.
The coalition also said that across Africa, hundreds of thousands of people each year are forcibly evicted -- in many
cases being left homeless, losing their possessions without compensation and/or being forcibly displaced far from
sources of employment, livelihood or education -- in violation of regional and international human rights standards,
including the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and
Cultural Rights. All 54 member states of the African Union are party to the African Charter while many African
governments are states parties to the Covenant.
Background
In the last two years, violent forced evictions have displaced thousands in Angola and left hundreds of thousands
destitute in Nigeria. In Zimbabwe, 700,000 persons were evicted in 2005 -- plunging the country deeper into humanitarian
crisis -- and in Sudan, mass forced evictions, including of IDPs in and around Khartoum, are of continuing concern. In
Kenya, residents continue to be violently evicted from forest areas and informal settlements without adequate
resettlement.
For further information, please see A Joint Appeal to African Ministers on Urban Housing, 3 April 2006, AI Index
32/002/2006
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