PHA-Exchange> KWRU/PPEHRC Involved in UN Consultation

Wed Nov 2 14:38:18 PST 2005

Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign helps to Organize:

United Nations Regional Consultation on Women and the Right to Adequate Housing in North America
with Miloon Kothari, UN Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing

See www.economichumanrights.org for more on the 

Poor People's Economic Human Rights campaign (PPEHRC), in the USA.

OCTOBER 15, 2005

16 grassroots women from the United States and Canada arrived in Washington, DC today for day one of the United Nations Regional Consultation on Women and the Right to Adequate Housing. Women from Kentucky to Saskatchewan, Maine to Prince Edward Island, California to British Columbia to Pennsylvania all came together at George Washington University Law School to share their stories of hardship and resistance with Miloon Kothari, the UN Rapporteur on Adequate Housing.

Download the 3-day program.

The Special Rapporteur, Mr. Kothari, with Leilani Farha
of the Center for Equality Rights in Accommodation (CERA) in Canada.

The day began with a welcome from Kothari and a brief description of the significance of this consultation. Similar consultations have been held in East Africa, Asia, the Pacific, and Latin America, and two consultations this fall will be located in Eastern Europe (Budapest) and the Mediterranean (Barcelona). The testimonies shared at all of these consultations will inform the Special Rapporteur's final report to the United Nations, Women, Housing and Land.

The late morning and afternoon included several trainings on the human right to housing. The American Civil Liberties Union, the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty and the Center on Housing Rights and Evictions were featured trainers in these sessions.

James Pfluecke and Cecilia Garza of the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign led a workshop in the afternoon specifically on "Direct Action, Public Awareness Campaigns, and the Media," together with Beverley Jacobs of the Native Women's Association of Canada.

OCTOBER 16, 2005

Today was our first full day of testimony. We covered several topics within women and the right to housing, from domestic violence, to issues affecting aboriginal women, to homelessness and more.

The women began the day with a panel on domestic violence, facilitated by Naomi Stern of the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty and Janine Grantham of the Women's Economic Agenda Project. In many ways this was the perfect topic to open with- many of the women here are survivors of violence and this became a recurring topic throughout the day.

Later in the morning we heard testimony from Erica, Beryl, and Leonie of Canada on issues affecting aboriginal women and the human right to housing. While no US women from the aboriginal community were present, we heard institutional testimony from attorneys at Wisconsin Judicare, which works with over 11 federally recognized Indian tribes in Northern Wisconsin.

The Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign would like to invite individual testimony from native women's groups here in the US. Testimony that is sent before November 15 may be included in Mr. Kothari's final report to the United Nations. To send testimony, email info at economichumanrights.org and housingwomen_un at yahoo.com.

Perhaps one of the highlights of the day was the panel on forced evictions. The panel featured testimony from Debra Frazier from Friends & Residents of Arthur Capper in Washington, DC and Marzetta McIntosh from the Coalition to Protect Public Housing in Chicago, Illinois. The panel was facilitated by Mayra Gomez from the Center on Housing Rights and Evictions and by "Junior," Marzetta's brother and another member of the Coalition to Protect Public Housing in Chicago.

Debra and Marzetta spoke as true experts on the effects of forced displacement and the destruction of community that takes place when poor people are pushed out of the housing projects in the US. Their stories were not their own stories so much as they were the stories of the Arthur Capper Projects and the Cabrini Green Projects as a whole.

As Junior said, "It's true that it takes a village to raise a child. And in these projects you have a village, but that village is being taken away...They're taking away public housing, they're trying to take away Section 8 (federally subsidized housing), they're making it harder and harder to make it up the housing ladder and into a place of stability."

The discussion was lively, in large part because this is an issue that is beginning to affect Canadian communities. Unfortunately, in communities like Chicago, Philadelphia, and several others in the US, the government has almost completely dismantled public housing without remorse. This is one of the reasons this consultation was so important. It put people in a room together who were never supposed to meet, who were never supposed to learn from each other, and who were never supposed to give each other the tools to preempt their community's oppression.

OCTOBER 17, 2005

During our final day of the consultation, we heard several more testimonies from the women. Our final panel was on an issue that has become very important to PPEHRC- the issue of unjust child removal.

We were joined by PPEHRC National Coordinator, Cheri Honkala, who just arrived from Dublin, Ireland where she was attending Front Line's 3rd Dublin Platform on Human Rights. Cheri was invited to attend this conference because of her work in defending the human right to housing. She facilitated the panel on unjust child removal and opened up by telling us of her very personal experience with this issue. Cheri was herself removed from her mother and separated from her brothers and sisters as a very young girl.

Eleanor from Women in Transition in Louisville, Kentucky, Nikki from POWER in Portland, Maine, and Julie from the Kensington Welfare Rights Union in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania shared their stories about how being removed from their mothers or how having their children removed from them has impacted their lives. The only barrier to uniting these families is safe, accessible, affordable housing.

As Julie told us, "It's hard to celebrate Mothers Day without all of my children...Christmas, Thanksgiving and other holidays are difficult too...If I can just get a 3 bedroom house that passes inspection by the end of November, I will be able to spend Christmas with all of my kids. That would be the best gift ever, to be with my treasures."

After every testimony had been shared, we had a short wrap up with Mr. Kothari to summarize the intense 3-day consultation. We took the opportunity to use the Special Rapporteur as a resource, asking him several questions about how to develop our housing work in the US and Canada.

Mr. Kothari underscored the importance of building community organizations. He encouraged us to break the culture of silence he sees in rich countries like ours, and to make more use of direct action, to make more use of protests, and to make more use sympathetic decision makers. 

Our governments have such a unique, growing contempt for human rights. They are unapologetically and systematically denying us the human right to housing. We must show leadership. We must shame our governments and we must hold them accountable. We will continue to organize, to speak out, to use the courts and to use the streets. We will see the human right to housing fulfilled, respected, and protected in our lifetime.

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