Miloon Kothari, the first United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing, has travelled far and wide on fact-finding missions. On Friday, Kothari’s travels brought him to U of T to give concluding remarks to the four-part Global Health Forum on Health, Housing, and Human Rights, hosted by U of T’s public health school.
The forum also featured NGO groups working in housing and homelessness. Topics included human rights in civil society, Canada’s progress in meeting its international housing obligations, and the intersections between health, housing, and human rights.
Kothari was Special Rapporteur from 2000 to 2008. Countries he has travelled to include Romania, Kenya, Brazil, and Cambodia. His mandate consists of annual reports to the UN Human Rights Council on adequate housing across the world as well as finding and proposing practical solutions.
When he was appointed, Kothari realized that he needed to expand the definition of adequate housing. In his first report, he gives a definition of the right to adequate housing as the “right of every woman, man, youth and child [to] gain and sustain a safe and secure home and community in which to live in peace and dignity.”
In both developing and developed countries, there were not enough accurate assessments of the scale of housing problems, Kothari said. In the case of Canada’s homelessness, there were neither proper definitions from the government nor an actual count of homeless people.
Kothari found that policy-makers often did not use available data and put other government priorities first. Obsession over home ownership and neoliberal economic policies make for policies that cater to the privileged, he said, with very little participation from people who suffer from the housing crisis. He also noted a lack of consideration for the links between health and housing, such as the effects of living in poor sanitary conditions.
Kothari also found that in most countries, women face multiple forms of discrimination. He has therefore called for greater recognition of the relationship between violence against women and inadequate housing.
