For immediate release
Contact: Maria Foscarinis or Tara Slepkow
(202) 638-2535 or (603) 860-0342
Increasing homelessness and decreasing housing resources in the U.S. violate the right to housing under International law, charges a report released today by the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty. Titled "Homelessness in the United States and the Human Right to Housing," the report was released on the eve of the World Social Forum, an international gathering of Human Rights activists in Mumbai, India. The report details the right to housing and current U.S. violations of this right.
International human rights law recognizes housing as a basic human right. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted with US leadership in 1948, states that: "Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services..." In 1996, the Habitat II conference, in which the US and 170 other nations participated, reaffirmed these basic principles.
Recent developments suggest that the U.S. is currently in violation of the human right to housing, and related human rights:
At least 840,000 people are homeless at any given time. Over a year, 2.5-3.5 million are homeless; of this number, 1.35 million are children.
There is not nearly enough emergency shelter to meet the need - in a 25-city survey by the U.S. Conference of Mayors, 84% of the cities surveyed in 2003 reported having to turn away homeless persons seeking emergency shelter, due to a lack of resources.
The situation is growing worse - 60% of the cities survey by the U.S. Conference of Mayors reported that the length of time people were homeless had increased; and cities reported that requests for shelter increased by an average of 13% in 2003.
Cities continue to criminalize homelessness by arresting people for performing necessary life sustaining activities, such as eating or sleeping, in public places.
In some cases, these violations lead to the ultimate
violation of human rights. "Homeless people are
literally freezing to death on U.S. streets," Said Maria
Foscarinis, Executive Director of The National Law Center on
Homelessness & Poverty. Each winter homeless people die
on the streets across the country - a direct and brutal
violation of the right to life guaranteed by the
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, a
treaty the US has signed and ratified. To date, at least two
homeless men have frozen to death in the Nation's capital
this winter alone.
In a preface written for the NLCHP report, Miloon Kothari,
Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing, UN Commission on
Human Rights states, "Such a scale of human rights
denial is a shocking testimony to the fact that the United
States has failed to uphold the human rights of its own
residents. Compounding this dire reality is the ironic fact
that the U.S. is one of the wealthiest nations in the world
and a proud promoter of democracy and freedoms across the
world."
NLCHP was founded in 1989 with the mission of preventing and
ending homelessness by acting as the legal arm of the
national movement to end homelessness.