COHRE Housing and ESC Rights Law Quarterly Vol7 No.2 2010

Housing and ESC Rights Law

Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions

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Vol. 7 - No. 2 June 2010

Q ua r t erly

National and international legal developments on housing and economic, social and cultural rights for housing rights lawyers, advocates and other interested parties.

Land Titling in Cambodia: Formalizing Inequality1

by Natalie Bugalski2 and David Pred3 In February 2007, the Municipality of Phnom Penh granted a 99-year lease to a private company, Shukaku Inc., over 133 hectares of prime real estate, including Boeung Kak lake and the surrounding land, where some 20,000 people reside. The lease agreement blatantly violates the Cambodian Land Law, which stipulates that State public property – including lakes, which have inherent public value – cannot be sold or subjected to long-term leases. Furthermore, a lessee must not damage the property or effect or change its public function.4 In direct contravention of the law, the company began filling the lake in August 2008, with the stated intention of building a new ‘satellite city’ with private villas, shops and office buildings on the site. The lease agreement usurps the land rights of residents, many of whom have been living around the lake since the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime in 1979 and thus have strong legal claims to the land.

1 This article is based on the findings in the report: Mark Grimsditch and Nick Henderson, Untitled: Tenure Insecurity and Inequality in the Cambodian Land Sector, published by Bridges Across Border Southeast Asia, Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions, and Jesuit Refugee Services (2009), which was edited by the authors.

2 Dr. Natalie Bugalski is a human rights lawyer and consultant specialising in land and housing rights issues in developing and post-conflict countries. Natalie was a Legal Officer at COHRE from January 2007 to December 2009.

3 David Pred is the Founder and Executive Director of Bridges Across Borders Cambodia, an international grassroots organization working to bring people together to overcome poverty, injustice and inequity in Cambodia.

4 Sub-Decree on Rules and Procedures on Reclassification of State Public Properties and Public Entities, No. 129 ANKr. BK 27/11/06., art 16.

1 • Land Titling in Cambodia: Formalizing Inequality

2 • Summary

9 • Case to Watch - Human Rights Committee: Stoyko Iliev Draganov et al. v. Bulgaria, Communication No. 1926/2010

8 • Case to Watch - Cambodia: Land Management and Administration Project (Credit No. 3650 - KH)

10 • Case to Watch - Human Rights Committee: Periodic Review of Israel

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Summary This edition of the Quarterly opens with an article on a World Bank land titling project in Cambodia – a project that has been poorly implemented and has resulted in the forced eviction and threatened forced eviction of the Boeung Kak lake community in Phnom Penh. The article analyzes the flawed implementation of the Land Management and Administration Project (LMAP) in the context of Cambodia’s unique land tenure system and rampant corruption in the land allocation processes of rapidly developing Phnom Penh – a context that has resulted in the urban poor suffering gross violations of human rights.

Following this article is a related Case to Watch involving a Request for Inspection to the World Bank Inspection Panel asking the Panel to investigate the LMAP. The Request for Inspection was found eligible for inspection in April 2010 and a full investigation has now commenced.

Other Cases to Watch in this edition of the Housing and ESC Rights Law Quarterly include two interventions before the Human Rights Committee.

The first deals with a complaint lodged against Bulgaria for forced eviction and threatened forced eviction of two Romani communities in the municipality of Bourgas. These evictions have occurred in the context of property rights restitution claims and decades of ongoing racial discrimination against the Roma population, including in the area of access to adequate housing and land tenure.

The second involves a Shadow Report on Israel to the Human Rights Committee. An earlier Shadow Report successfully got the issues of forced eviction on the agenda of the periodic review of Israel. For the first time, the Human Rights Committee is also examining potential violations of the right to water under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The current Shadow Report, by COHRE and Al-Haq, delves deeper into violations of the right to adequate housing and the right to water and sanitation, as well as related rights such as the right to freedom of movement and the prohibition on cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment.

We are thankful to the Housing Rights Programme, a joint initiative of UN‑HABITAT and the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and the Open Society Institute for providing the funding necessary to make the Housing and ESC Rights Law Quarterly a regular publication and ensuring its widest possible distribution.

For additional information on the justiciability of ESC rights, see www.cohre.org/litigation and the Case Law Database at www.escr-net.org.

We welcome any comments, submissions of case notes and articles, as well as information on new cases and relevant events and publications.

Please feel free to contact us at: quarterly@cohre.org

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>> Illegal land-grabbing by powerful actors is unexceptional in Cambodia, where forced evictions and confiscation of land rank among the country’s most pervasive human rights problems.

Since 1990, approximately 11 percent of the population of Phnom Penh has been forcibly evicted and relocated to periurban resettlement sites that often lack housing, basic infrastructure, and access to public services and employment.5 In rural areas, more than a quarter of Cambodia’s arable lands have been carved up and granted as “economic land concessions” to Cambodian and foreign investors without regard for the rights of affected rural and indigenous communities. As a result, these communities have suffered widespread displacement, dispossession of their farming and grazing lands and reduced access to the forests that sustain their livelihoods.6 What makes the Boeung Kak case stand out is that the lease was signed shortly after the commune7 involved completed the systematic land registration process under the multi-donor funded Land Management and Administration Project (LMAP). Had the process of land adjudication and registration been conducted according to the law, many households around the lake would have had an opportunity to stake their claim to legal possession rights, and thus to formal title pursuant to the Land Law. Instead, the area covered by the lease was declared by the Municipality of Phnom Penh to be a “development zone” 5 Land and Housing Working Group, 2009. Land and Housing Rights in Cambodia Parallel Report to the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, 11-12.

6 United Nations Special Representative of the Secretary-General for human rights in Cambodia, 2007. Economic Land Concessions in Cambodia, A Human Rights Perspective,1.

7 The commune is the administrative unit above the village and below the district in Cambodia.

and was excised from the wider adjudication area. The households were thus arbitrarily cut-off from the land titling process and blocked from claiming their legitimate entitlements. More than one thousand affected families have since been coerced into accepting compensation for a fraction of market value for their homes and land, and the remaining roughly three thousand families are currently facing the threat of forced eviction.

A brief background on land tenure in Cambodia While generally not dissimilar to patterns experienced by other rapidly developing countries, current land tenure conditions in Cambodia are also a manifestation of unique historical factors coupled with the recent introduction of policies and programs typical of the dominant development paradigm. The significance of historical factors is particularly pronounced in a country in which the population was uprooted and the thenexisting land tenure system was erased by one of the twentieth century’s most sweeping revolutions. During the Democratic Kampuchea regime (1975 to 1979), private property was abolished and land records were destroyed. The nation’s population was forced to toil on large collectivized farms and irrigation projects, where more than one million people were worked or starved to death.

After the regime was toppled by Vietnamese armed forces, people began returning to their homelands or settling in new areas to rebuild their lives. In Phnom Penh, which was evacuated and left largely vacant during the Khmer Rouge reign, people began to return from the countryside and refugee camps – occupying housing and settling on land largely on an ad hoc basis.

The withdrawal of the Vietnamese administration in 1989 paved the way for the Paris Peace Agreement in 1991 and the establishment of the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC). Under the tutelage of UNTAC, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and other financial and development institutions, a market economy was initiated, with policies aimed towards private sector development and foreign investment, including the formalization of land ownership.

Private property rights were first reinstated in 1989 and an active land market soon emerged. While no effective formal land registration mechanism was established in the 1990s, land ownership, use and transfers were “informally” recognized by local authorities through the issuance of various forms of documentation.

The Land Law protects legal possessors from interference with their rights until full ownership is conferred.8 The effect of this provision should be that until a peaceful occupant’s land rights are determined through the adjudication process, no eviction is lawful. Once land is registered as private property, both the Constitution and the Land Law stipulate that expropriation may only be carried out by the State in the public interest after fair and just compensation has been paid.

The Land Management and Administration Project The multi-donor supported Land Management and Administration Project (LMAP) began in 2002 as the first phase of the Government’s land reform programme and was established to give effect to key provisions of the 2001 Land Law. The project was originally envisioned as the first phase of a programme of land reform to be implemented over a 15-year period, with the objectives of strengthening land tenure security and land markets, preventing or resolving land disputes, managing land and natural resources in an equitable, sustainable and efficient manner, and promoting equitable land distribution. LMAP intended to focus on the development of the legal and regulatory framework, institutional development, land titling and registration, strengthening land dispute resolution mechanisms, and land management.9 The primary donors to the project were the World Bank (pledging $28.83 million), GTZ ($3.5 million in technical assistance), and the Government of Finland ($3.5 million in technical assistance).10 The Canadian International

The hindrance of peaceful occupation in an area not yet covered by a Cadastral Index Map (the document produced when the systematic titling process is completed) is prohibited (Land Law 2001, Article 248).

9 World Bank, 2002. Project Appraisal Document for a Land Management and Administration Project.

10 World Bank Website, LMAP summary, http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTCAMBODIA/ Resources/Cambodia_Project_Updates.pdf, (accessed September 2009).

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Development Agency (CIDA) joined the project in 2004, committing more than CN$10 million in both funding and technical assistance through to 2012.11 Over the project’s duration (2002 – 2009), a number of goals were achieved: key parts of the legal framework were developed, technical capacity of Land Ministry staff was strengthened, and an estimated 1.3 million titles were issued.

Yet despite these achievements, the failure of the project to tackle fundamental inequities in the control and management of land meant that it did not improve tenure security for the segments of Cambodian society that are most vulnerable to displacement. Vulnerable households that have legal possession rights are routinely and arbitrarily denied access to land titling and dispute resolution mechanisms, undermining the project’s central aims of reducing poverty and promoting social stability.12 Two main factors in the design and implementation of LMAP impaired the capacity of the systematic titling mechanism to achieve its aim of improving land tenure security: the exclusion of difficult areas and the lack of transparency in State land classification. These factors in practice allowed municipal and provincial authorities’ unchecked discretion in the selection of adjudication areas, which has benefitted powerful actors at the expense of vulnerable households.

Exclusion of difficult areas The first key factor in the design of LMAP that blocked vulnerable households and communities from accessing title is that areas “likely to be disputed” and areas of “unclear status” were excluded from the system.13 These terms were not defined in the project design documents, allowing for the arbitrary exclusion of areas from the titling process. We refer to them here as “difficult areas”.

In practice, the exclusion of these difficult areas allowed provincial or municipal authorities, who are in charge of selecting adjudication zones, to excise areas that are sought after by powerful domestic actors and foreign investors. This exclusion occurred both through the selection of adjudication areas and through the excision of zones within adjudication areas on an arbitrary basis. It is important to note that the same authorities conferred with the power to select adjudication areas have also played a significant role in land-grabbing and forced evictions in many cases. The selection of adjudication areas has largely occurred in an opaque manner, without information about the process being made available to the public, nor consultations with affected persons about decisions to excise specific areas. As a result, many thousands of households that lie within excised portions of land are being evicted without their tenure status ever being assessed – in direct contravention of the Land Law. The decision to avoid difficult or complex areas in favour of targeting areas in which adjudication would be relatively straightforward may be reasonable during an initial period to build capacity of titling teams. However, without the terms being clearly defined, this design feature presents a significant loophole that allows land grabbing to continue unhindered by the land registration process.

Attempting to register only non-contentious plots of land throughout the country is counter-intuitive, given the aim of LMAP to reduce the instances of land conflict and land grabbing. Given that the raison d’être of the land registration programme is to clarify the status of land according to legally prescribed definitions; the exclusion of areas of “unclear status” is a peculiar design feature. At what point and by what process does an area’s status become clear and therefore a target of land registration?

Although titling under LMAP was to avoid disputed areas, LMAP did aim to build the capacity of the Cadastral Commission. The 2001 Land Law established the Cadastral Commission, which has jurisdiction of first instance for the resolution of disputes over unregistered land. However, according to a World Bank study, people involved in disputes often avoid filing complaints as “[f]ormal institutions of justice such as the Cadastral Commission CIDA Website, Cambodia: CIDA funded projects, http://www.acdi-cida.gc.ca/CIDAWEB/cpo.nsf/fWebCSAZEn?ReadForm&idx=01&CC=KH, (accessed March 2010) 12 See, Bridges Across Borders South East Asia, Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions and Jesuit Refugee Services, 2009. Untitled: Tenure Insecurity and Inequality in the Cambodian Land Sector.

13 World Bank, 2002, Op cit., 24.

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or the courts [are] perceived as costly, time consuming and biased toward the rich.”14 Poor and vulnerable communities involved in disputes with powerful and well-connected individuals who do file complaints to the Cadastral Commission find them unresolved, rejected or simply ignored.

This impotence of the Cadastral Commission and the courts to resolve disputes between weak and powerful parties in accordance with the law raises larger questions about the design and sequencing of the project. Should a formal titling process ever have been initiated in the Cambodian political context without first strengthening these institutions and the rule of law?

In 2001 a new Land Law was approved by the National Assembly, which was widely hailed as progressive and transformative, providing a strong legislative basis for the equitable protection of land rights. Importantly, the law confirms that people who occupied property before 31 August 2001, and meet a number of other conditions, have exclusive rights to the property, which can be transferred to full ownership.15 Such rights are known as “possession rights” and form the legal basis of the adjudication process in the land titling and registration programme that commenced the following year. Possession of property that is State public property, as defined by the law, or someone else’s private property, is not legal. Any occupation of land that commenced after the passage of the law is also illegal.

Lack of transparency in State land classification The lack of transparency in State land classification and registration is another crucial factor in the exclusion of vulnerable households from the land titling system. Under LMAP, the titling of private land was to occur in conjunction with State land classification. A key component of the project was to clarify procedures for defining different types of land and to create land classification maps for all project provinces. Despite the passage of the 2001 Land Law and a number of regulations issued in relation to State land management, there is still no coordinated and transparent land management system in place. To date, there has been minimal or no public involvement in the development of such a system, and if any State land database exists, it is not available for public viewing. Consecutive LMAP supervision reports assessed this component as performing poorly.16 In the absence of a transparent State land classification process, and a publically available database of State land, attempts to register private land through a fair and legal process are easily thwarted. Denial of title is routinely justified by the assertion that people are illegally settled on State land; yet these claims by the State are being made outside the legal framework.

The failure of this component of LMAP is unsurprising, bearing in mind the opportunistic way in which authorities have arbitrarily classified land to serve the interests of powerful actors and the private sector. The result has been the improper classification of land as State property for the purpose of facilitating commercial development projects, including the granting of large-scale land concessions. In turn, these actions have led to forced displacement, land alienation, and the loss of residential land, farmlands and public spaces.

The Boeung Kak case exemplifies how, by excising certain areas from the registration process, authorities arbitrarily classify land as State property, without regard to its characteristics or the legitimate rights of those residing there. Many households in the Boeung Kak area had been recognised by local authorities since the 1990s through “informal” tenure systems, including the issuance of house numbers, family books, small infrastructure improvements and the official witnessing of land sale contracts. In 2006, the commune of Sras Chok, including the area surrounding Boeung Kak lake, was announced as an adjudication zone for the purposes of systematic land registration. Possession rights of each household should have been assessed and if found valid, full land titles conferred. Any competing claims to the land should have been resolved in the process, and if this was not possible, they should have been referred to the Cadastral Commission for resolution according to the law.

However, residents say that when they requested that their land claims be investigated, their requests were denied on the grounds that they were living inside a “development zone.” The cadastral map was posted for public display in early January 2007 with ownership of all plots within the development zone listed as “unknown.”

World Bank, 2006, Op cit.

Land Law 2001, Article 38.

16 World Bank, 2009. Cambodia Land Management and Administration Project – Enhanced Review Report.

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Later that month, the Municipality signed an agreement to lease the lake and the surrounding land to Shukaku Inc. for US$79 million, a fraction of the estimated value of the land.

A letter was sent from the Phnom Penh Department of Land Management to the Municipality in July 2008 informing the Governor of Phnom Penh that the lake and surrounding area had “been studied and demarcated.”

Although no formal registration of the land to the State appears to have occurred, the adjudication process resulted in a de facto determination of the status of the land as State-owned. This was confirmed when the Municipality entered into a lease agreement with the private company.

Meanwhile, the residents were pressured into leaving their homes without having their right to apply for title being realised by LMAP, and with no meaningful access to dispute resolution mechanisms. The Boeung Kak case serves as a pertinent example of the manipulation of the land classification and registration system to serve powerful interests and deny people their legal rights. \

A ‘dual system’ of rights protection The exclusion of vulnerable households from the donor-funded titling programme amounts to systematic unequal treatment within Cambodia’s land rights protection regime.

Most households that perceive themselves as owners have traditionally relied on various documentation issued by local authorities (sometimes called “soft title”) to prove their claims to the property. The recognition of possession rights in the 2001 Land Law, including the right to convert legal possession into full ownership through title, was intended as a mechanism to incorporate this pre-existing tenure system into the formal centralised system. As noted above, the Land Law protects all peaceful occupants of immovable property from interference with their possession until rights over the land have been determined through the adjudication and registration process.

However, once land becomes sought after, it is commonplace for the land rights of possessors to be denied, even if they have strong documentation to support a claim for lawful possession. Without ‘hard’ formal title, possessors are accused of being ‘illegal squatters,’ and this in turn has become a common justification for eviction. This accusation disregards the fact that many of these households have not had their land claims fairly assessed through the formal land registration process. The evictions that often follow these accusations also disregard the legislated moratorium upon any interference with peaceful possession prior to land registration.

LMAP did not create this ‘dual system’. Formal titles were being issued sporadically to the privileged few prior to the commencement of LMAP. These titles existed alongside the ‘soft’ recognition from local authorities.

However, rather than effectively and uniformly incorporating the old tenure system into the new formal one, LMAP appears to have fortified the dual system’s unequal protection of rights. By expanding the reach of the formal titling system, LMAP has increased the actual and perceived superiority of hard titles issued under the project vis-à-vis the documentation and recognition of occupancy that characterised the pre-existing tenure system. LMAP has thus unwittingly weakened the tenure status of those households who have been excluded from the formal system and thus must continue to rely on their local documentation and recognition as the basis of their rights to the land.

The Boeung Kak case provides an illustration of this dual system in practice. Many Boeung Kak residents hold documents that demonstrate their lawful possession and recognition by local authorities under the pre-existing tenure system. When Boeung Kak residents were blocked from the titling process, their previous tenure status was disregarded and they were homogeneously accused of illegally occupying State land. In effect, the project not only failed to adjudicate and formalise their tenure but it also degraded their pre-existing tenure status, leaving them more vulnerable to forced eviction. Households with legal possession rights that should have been converted to ownership under LMAP were denied their constitutional right to fair and just compensation in advance of property expropriation.

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Complaint to the World Bank Inspection Panel When the Boeung Kak area was de facto classified as State land during the flawed adjudication process, the estimated 4,000 families residing there were effectively categorised en masse as illegal squatters.

According to the LMAP credit agreement between the World Bank and the Cambodian Government, a Resettlement Policy Framework was to be applied “in the event of eviction from state land” resulting from the adjudication process.17 The policy required that evictions be avoided whenever possible and in cases in which they are unavoidable, proper compensation and resettlement options be offered to affected persons in order to ensure that, at a minimum, their living standards are maintained. The policy – an important human rights protection component of the titling programme – was not applied to the eviction of households in the Boeung Kak area. A regular World Bank supervision mission that visited the adjudication area in 2008 failed to query the exclusion of the Boeung Kak residents from the titling process or raise concerns about the impending evictions and the application of the Resettlement Policy Framework.

In August 2009, prompted by lobbying from community and NGO advocates, as well as the report of a World Bank Safeguards Review Mission, the World Bank’s Regional Vice President called for the application of the Resettlement Policy Framework in the case of Boeung Kak in a meeting with senior government officials.

Shortly after, in early September, the Government announced its decision to cancel the remaining World Bank financing for LMAP, citing as its reason the complexity of the conditions attached to the funds.18 On the same day as the Government announced that it was terminating LMAP, COHRE and Bridges Across Borders Cambodia filed a complaint with the World Bank Inspection Panel, upon the request of Boeung Kak residents,19 who were denied both proper adjudication of their land rights and the application of the LMAP Resettlement Policy Framework. The complaint alleges that the Bank breached its operational policies by failing to adequately supervise LMAP, which denied Boeung Kak and other vulnerable households access to due process in contesting competing claims to the land. It further claims that the Bank failed to ensure government compliance with the Resettlement Policy Framework in the case of evictions from State land in areas that have undergone the systematic titling process, including evictions from the Boeung Kak area.

In April 2010, the World Bank Board of Executive Directors approved the Inspection Panel’s recommendation to conduct a full investigation into LMAP. The community representatives and land rights advocates who lodged the complaint are demanding that the Bank, which bears responsibility under its own safeguard policies, provide reparations directly to the affected families if the Cambodian government refuses to remedy the harm done. See Case to Watch section below for more details.

Conclusions Eight years after the commencement of LMAP, forced evictions, land-grabbing and land disputes continue to escalate in Cambodia. The flaws in the design and implementation of LMAP, set within the complex environment in which the project operated, impeded its ability to improve tenure security on an equitable basis. Households with possession rights that have been unable to register their land have been subjected to accusations of being ‘illegal squatters’ because they have no formal title, despite having documents demonstrating legal recognition of occupation by local authorities under the pre-existing tenure system. Meanwhile, those instigating the evictions have no problem formally registering the expropriated land in their names, despite the absence of any legitimate basis for their claims under the Land Law. By excluding households vulnerable to displacement and failing to implement a transparent, rule-based process for titling decisions, LMAP effectively formalised, and arguably deepened, structural inequality in land tenure and administration in Cambodia. By sponsoring LMAP and failing to challenge this unequal treatment before the law, the multilateral and bilateral donors have legitimised what amounts to a systematic violation of human rights.

It is incumbent on the donors and the government to design and implement subsequent phases of Cambodia’s land reform programme to ensure equal treatment and due process in all land administration decisions.

International Development Association, 2002. Development Credit Agreement (Land Management and Administration Project) between the Kingdom of Cambodia and International Development Association, 21.

18 International Development Association, 2009. Management Response to the Request for an Inspection Panel Review of the Cambodia Land Management and Administration Project, 33.

19 The complaint was co-drafted by the authors of this article.

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Case to Watch Cambodia: Land Management and Administration Project (Credit No. 3650 - KH) In April 2010, the World Bank Inspection Panel announced that it will conduct a full investigation into a World Bank funded land titling project in Cambodia, following a complaint that groups vulnerable to forced eviction have suffered serious harm from the project. The complaint was filed in September 2009 by COHRE, with the support of Bridges Across Borders Cambodia and other Cambodian housing rights groups, on behalf of more than 4000 families living around Boeung Kak lake who have suffered from or are currently threatened with forced eviction.

It alleges that the Bank breached its operational policies by failing to adequately supervise the Land Management and Administration

Project (LMAP), which has denied urban poor and other vulnerable households due process rights and protection against increasing landgrabbing and forced evictions in Cambodia.

In its response to the complaint issued in December, the World Bank acknowledged the validity of these claims and agreed to approach the Cambodian Government to discuss measures to mitigate the harms of the project. The proposed measures included improving the living conditions and livelihood opportunities for people who have been evicted or who are at risk of forced eviction. However, the Cambodian Government did not agree with the proposed plan and

Case to Watch by David Pred and Bret Thiele

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refused to partner with the World Bank to address the claims made in the complaint.

It is hoped that the full inspection will result in lessons learned that will prevent housing rights violations in the context of the LMAP and other land titling projects as well as having the World Bank stand by its commitment to mitigate the damages already suffered by the Boeung Kak lake community, even if the Bank needs to do so on its own.

Case to Watch Human Rights Committee: Stoyko Iliev Draganov et al. v. Bulgaria, Communication No. 1926/2010 In July, the Human Rights Committee will be considering a complaint by COHRE and its Bulgaria partner, Equal Opportunities Association (EOA), dealing with forced evictions and threatened forced evictions of two Romani communities in Bourgas, Bulgaria. The complaint, Stoyko Iliev Draganov et al. v.

Bulgaria, Communication No. 1926/2010, argues that the forced evictions violate Bulgaria’s obligations under Articles 2, 17 and 26 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and requests that the Committee issue Interim Measures to prevent any further forced evictions and to provide alternative housing to

those rendered homeless by the past evictions that occurred in September 2009.

The complaint notes that the Municipality of Bourgas argues that the communities are situated on land privately owned by others, but COHRE and EOA argue that the remedy for enforcing property rights should not and indeed can not lawfully be implemented by carrying out a gross violation of human rights such as forced eviction, particularly when the reason for the current informal residence situation is on account of the unwillingness of the Republic of Bulgaria to fulfil

the right to adequate housing without discrimination. Rather, the complaint argues, an alternative remedy could involve Bulgaria providing compensation to the ostensible owner of the land in question and then meeting its obligation to respect, protect and fulfil the right to adequate housing by regularising the communities in question, including by providing the communities with a degree of security of tenure that guarantees legal protection against forced eviction, harassment and other threats.

Case to Watch prepared by Bret Thiele

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Case to Watch Human Rights Committee: Periodic Review of Israel The Human Rights Committee will undertake the periodic review of Israel’s compliance with its obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in July 2010. The List of Issues, which defines the scope of the periodic review, indicates that the Human Rights Committee is taking the principle of the indivisibility to heart in its examination of Israel. The List of Issues includes the practice of forced eviction and housing demolition under not only Article 17 (non-interference with the home), but also under Article 26, which guarantees equal protection of the law. By using the term “forced eviction,” the Committee uses the precise legal language from the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), which it began using in 2005, with its Concluding Observations on Kenya, thus highlighting the indivisibility of housing rights in the two Covenants. An analysis under Article 26 could break new ground if the Committee applies the equal protection of the law standard to social rights, including those guaranteed by the ICESCR. For the first time, the Committee’s List of Issues also includes the right to water, both in the context of the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967 and in the context of the Bedouin in the Negev, the latter of whom are Israeli citizens. The Committee looks at the right to water under both the Article 6 protection of the right to life and Article 26. The Committee also includes the right to water, as well as housing rights, in the context of the Bedouin in the Negev under the rubric of the Article 27 protection of ethnic minorities to enjoy their own culture, including the right to their land and traditional way of life.

The Editorial Board of the Housing an ESC Rights Law Quarterly is:

• Salih Booker, Executive Director, Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE), Switzerland; • Lilian Chenwi, Coordinator and Senior Researcher, Community Law Centre, South Africa; • Eliane Drakopoulos, Director of Communications, Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE), Switzerland; • Colin Gonsalves, Executive Director, Human Rights Law Network, India; Aoife Nolan, Assistant Director, Human Rights Centre, Queen’s University, Belfast, Northern Ireland.

• Bruce Porter, Executive Director, Social Rights Advocacy Centre, Canada; • Julieta Rossi, Director, ESCR-Net, USA; • Bret Thiele, Coordinator, Senior Expert – Litigation and Legal Advocacy, COHRE, Switzerland.

Coordinating Editor: • Bret Thiele, Coordinator, COHRE Senior Expert for Litigation & Legal Advocacy, Switzerland.

CONTACT If you have any comments, require additional copies, wish to contribute to or wish to subscribe to the mailing list for the Housing and ESC Rights Law Quarterly, please contact: quarterly@ cohre.org For general information on the COHRE ESC Rights Litigation and Legal Advocacy Initiative, please contact: litigation@ cohre.org

Case to Watch prepared by Bret Thiele

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Centre on Housing Rights & Evictions (COHRE) COHRE ESC Rights Litigation Programme Rue de Montbrillant 83 1202 Geneva Switzerland tel.: +41.22.734.1028 fax: +41.22.733.8336 e‑mail: cohre@cohre.org web: http://www.cohre.org 10