UN Geneva - Multimedia Newsroom : HRC Press Conference: Special Rapporteur on Housing

Good morning everyone and thank you very much for joining us at this press briefing today.

Today's briefing will be by Mr Balakrishnan Rajgopal, the Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing.

The Special Rapporteur's report to the Human Rights Council yesterday introduced the first comprehensive set of human rights based standards on resettlement aimed at ensuring that resettlement processes and outcomes uphold dignity, equality, participation and non discrimination.

We'll begin with brief opening statements from Special Rapporteur and then move on to question.

Special Rapporteur, you have the flow.

[Other language spoken]

Good morning everyone and I'm glad to be here.

The deep terms 2 terms I've had a special rapporteur on right to adequate housing comes to an end this year, so I'm also in a position to offer some brief reflections on what I have faced and how I judge the overall situation.

With regard to the respect for the right to adequate housing, throughout my tenure I can say that I have dealt with the right to adequate housing in the context of an overlapping series of crises.

First, there was a COVID-19 crisis when I took over in 2020, but then we also had an already an ongoing crisis of affordability of housing.

We had an ongoing crisis of climate which posed grave threats to the right to adequate housing.

We, of course, had an escalating number of conflicts which displaced and we made people lose their homes around the world.

So these were already familiar crises.

I have reported on all of them.

On this entirety, housing corresponding to pandemics like COVID-19.

On the global affordability crisis that now engulfs even middle class households who cannot afford to rent even one or two-bedroom homes.

On the climate emergency and environmental degradation, as well as unfortunately an increasing number of people who are being moved aside in the name of tackling climate crisis, for example, because their lands are needed for carbon credit schemes.

On migration and it's politicisation and political instrumentalization by politicians who blame their home grown housing crises on the presence of a few migrants from abroad.

On the phenomenon that I have called domicide, the mass destruction of homes during conflict, which unfortunately have proliferated even compared to 2020 when I felt that there were already too many conflicts in the world.

But compared to then and now after six years, things are far worse.

I've also reported on structural issues such as land and, of course, on the question of persistent problems with the question of resettlement after people lose their homes, either because of evictions or displacement for whatever reason.

I'll come to that in a moment, but I just want to say that these escalating crises exist along with older problems with regard to the right to adequate housing, including not just the persistence of massive homelessness, but also the increasing tendency on the part of States to criminalise homeless persons for performing life affirming tasks like eating or sleeping in public.

So these are serious issues.

I've written reports on all of them.

And if I in the light of that, if I someone asks me what do you think has happened to the right adequate housing over the last six years, I would say have things improved?

I would say definitely not and I probably will say that things are far worse with some exceptions here and there.

I mean just look at looking at the number of urgent communication or complaints that I received from affected individuals or civil society organisations around the world and the number in the hundreds.

And I'm able to act on only some of them.

But even then over six years I've written over 460 communications to states, to international organisations, to non state actors and businesses.

This is a massive number.

And many of these complaints involve displacement and evictions of thousands of people, thousands of people.

It's not the loss of one or two persons homes we are talking about South.

In my view, I would just say that the situation is actually at a stage where it's unclear to me whether States and other actors take seriously the idea that housing is a human right.

It is not a disposable asset to be speculated on by billionaires.

Real estate is not the right lens to look at housing.

It is not a disposable and exchangeable thing that if a home is demolished, simply another home can be built in its in its wake.

Even if it is, and often it is not.

It is something that I would call as an anchor, a foundation for the realisation of so many other human rights.

Home is where people discover their security and dignity and safety.

Home is where they discover the value and the meaning of family life.

Home is where they learn even to, for example, enjoy their right to adequate food or water and sanitation.

Without home, there is no access to most of the things that make people fully human, and unfortunately this is not reflected in today's world.

Homes are built and even as they are built they are destroyed in far greater numbers with the complete abandoned and not just during conflict but during so-called peaceful times in the name of achieving development objectives, whether for large development projects or urban renewal or other other factors.

I have reported on all of them.

With regard to domicide, I have particularly pointed to situations in in in a report that I submitted also yesterday to the Human Rights Council, which is a follow up report to my first report on domicide to the UN General Assembly in 2022.

This follow up report reports specifically on 4 situations, Palestine especially focus on Gaza, Ukraine, Myanmar and Sudan.

All of them are grave, grave situations and I'm happy to discuss them more.

I also recognise the fact that the destruction of housing in conflict creates immense practical and human rights challenges for reconstruction once the hostilities are tapering off or coming to an end.

And in response to requests from States and other actors, I have developed draft guiding principles on human rights based reconstruction that centre the idea that homes are the most important thing to be rebuilt when conflicts end.

And when we approach reconstruction after conflicts end, we have to treat homes as part of a definition of the right to adequate housing.

Not to see housing construction as something that is simply about building structures, for example.

But it should be seen as about rebuilding rights and dignity and lives.

And it should be seen as simply something that can be looked at as a matter of real estate, for example, as we are seeing, for example, in the case of Gaza, with the sort of approaches taken by the so-called Board of Peace and illegal creation by the Security Council.

I believe that we need a very different framework.

And I'm glad to say that tomorrow there will be a side event on the draft principles on reconstruction.

And I invite you to share these widely.

Now, finally, a few words on the guiding principles on resettlement, which was the main report that I presented yesterday.

[Other language spoken]

What do we mean by resettlement?

Well, resettlement is the process of how do you actually respond to people who have lost their homes?

They lose their homes because of, of course, conscious actions by governments and powerful actors as evictions.

Your landlord can evict you, but so can the government that can evict you.

But eviction is only one way you lose your home.

You also lose your home because of displacement.

And displacement doesn't often have to be even conscious.

You lose, you get displaced from your home because of natural disasters, for example, or because of conflict, or because of structural economic reasons that make living in your home not viable anymore and you have to, you're forced to flee.

And what the principles, the guiding principles on resettlement do is to highlight the fact that whenever mass displacement happens, that is in fact a human rights crisis happening, not just when people are displaced, but a human rights crisis that is brewing when those who are displays are not resettled so that they can recover a chance to re establish their lives and enjoy the right to adequate housing again.

That often completely is forgotten and the record is pretty poor.

Resettlement efforts, when they happen, are poorly planned, financed and implemented.

Most governments don't take responsibility for them, don't even collect data on the number of people who remain to be resettled.

And I have pointed that out over two previous reports.

And in this report, after a three-year process of consultation, I have issued these guiding principles on resettlement that aim to improve the record of resettlement.

It points out that resettlement is not just a logistical exercise, it's a human rights issue and moving people around is not a game.

Moving people around from their homes should never mean moving them into poverty, for example, which is unfortunately what happens most of the time.

So the first message in this report is that preventing displacement must always be a priority.

Don't let it happen and then deal with it.

[Other language spoken]

And even if it is for ostensibly reasons of development, no concept of development is worth it if it means that all development has to involve displacement.

And I would say the same thing about climate action, that it shouldn't come at the expense of the most vulnerable losing their homes.

And if resettlement does have to happen because people have lost their homes, especially because of unavoidable reasons such as disasters, then I would say that in fact the goal must be restoration and improvement of living conditions, not simply building a structure.

Resettlement should not simply relocate people's homes, it must relocate people's rebuild people's lives.

That's extremely important.

And finally, I would say that the resettlement, when it does happen, has to be seen as a collective responsibility, but it starts with the responsibility of those who cause displacement and evictions.

If a government wants to evict individuals, the government is responsible for ensuring that their homes and their lives are restored.

If displacement happens because of disasters, then the root cause of the disasters have to be borne in mind.

If climate related reasons are driving more people from a displace from their homes, it raises profound questions about what is the responsibility of rich countries or richer classes who lead to climate consequences because of the their way of life.

For example, that leads to more and more vulnerable people losing their homes.

This has profound implications for conversations about climate finance and when of course, water conflict happens.

Of course, those who bomb and people make people lose their homes have primary responsibility for rebuilding their homes.

So in that context, I would say why isn't even a conversation happening about the responsibility of a state like Israel when it comes to the destruction that they've got, that they've cost across Gaza?

For example, in the Board of Peace, they're a member of the Board of Peace, but there is no conversation about who is responsible and how these responsibilities have to be discharged.

So with that, I would I would just say that it's clear that the world continues, unfortunately, to face too many challenges with regard to housing.

Housing is still not taken seriously as a human right.

And I hope that really changes because all of our future depends on it.

[Other language spoken]

Yes, Antonio, please state your name and organisation before asking a question.

[Other language spoken]

I am Antonio Brotto from Spanish news agency FA.

You spoke about especially a situation in in conflict, but I want to ask you about the situation in my country, Spain, because we think that the lack of housing is one of the main economic and social problems right now.

So there is different opinions on, on the factors of these problems.

Some say it's the migrant pressure that you mentioned.

Also others say that the tourist exploitation of apartments also speculation of investors.

So I, I want to ask you, what do you think are the main factors and what are the measures that countries like Spain could take?

Also, if you know what, what is the government doing already, right?

Because for example, they just announced a few days ago that they are going to try to build 15,000 houses per year.

Do you think this is enough?

And also they are in in the other hand, they are relaxing the the eviction measures.

There was a limitation for vulnerable people, but now this, it looks like this limitation is not going to be stayed.

So if you have any, any comments about about the situation in Spain, thank you.

It's important to acknowledge that there is really a need for building more housing, especially affordable housing for those who currently are unable to find homes that they can afford.

And many, unfortunately in many countries, and that includes Spain, the primarily market LED approach to housing that has dominated policy making since at least I would say the 1990s has actually removed much of affordable housing from the from those who actually need it in the first place.

There is a shortage of housing for clear for sure that we see that.

And I fully support the efforts of the government of Spain to build more homes for those who who need it.

But the idea is to make sure that they're truly for those who deserve it and who need it.

They have to be truly affordable.

And then the but the other issue that I think is very important is that the solution to the affordable housing crisis and if I might add, homelessness and the rise of dark political tendencies that actually enable the housing crisis to be blamed on say, migrants, which then leads to the rise of far right political parties, is something that has to be seen as not simply the unavailable, something that results from the lack of availability of adequate housing units, but also the inability to keep people in their homes.

The first way you actually avoid people a housing crisis is not allowing it to happen in the worst place.

And that involves A commitment to, for example, ensure that evictions, in particular in urban areas are not so easy, that tenants for example, have greater rights to remain in their homes.

That the rents that people pay as tenants, for example, are not usurious or capable of being subjected to speculative pressures, especially involving large scale real estate firm or hedge fund owned housing, which unfortunately have been have become reality in many European countries.

That they don't end up treating housing as simply an asset, financial asset that they can speculate and profit from.

That there are reasonable limits on the rents that can be charged.

And this has been a major issue in not just Spain but elsewhere.

I do think that it's also important to make sure that there are the legal procedures for evictions are are strengthened to ensure that the rights of those who currently live in their homes are prioritised and protected.

For example, ensuring even fundamental legal assistance in proceedings for evictions or ensuring that evictions cannot happen if they will result in people becoming homeless.

Unambiguous commitments that no eviction to homelessness will be allowed to happen.

These are guarantees that need to be in place.

And finally, I would say that there needs to be a commitment to structural issues that have led European governments down this path.

And I saw that in Netherlands when I did a country visit in 2020.

Netherlands is a country with a very large number of social housing historically.

But despite such social housing, many, many people in Netherlands still find access to adequate housing impossible.

And then it led to again, the rise of this dark political tendencies to blame their homegrown housing crisis on migrants and the rise of racism in conversations about housing, which is very, very unfortunate.

Because if you look at, for example, the root cause of some of these crises, you look at the fact that housing has not been treated as a human right in decades at the European level.

They didn't even have an affordable housing plan until this year.

Now that is now finally a European Europe wide affordable housing plan.

But why did it take so long for this to happen?

And when will it actually be implemented going forward?

Because the crises are happening right now as we speak.

The other issue that I would say that's very important is that if you look at successful examples, including in Europe, of where people are still able to afford homes and don't lose their homes and become homeless, it is in cities like Vienna.

And what's the difference between Vienna and, say, for example, some of the leading Spanish cities, whether it's Madrid or Barcelona?

Well, the one big difference is the relationship with land.

Now VNR has actually gone through a system that dates to more than 100 years ago.

That actually has to do with the fact that land is not treated as a speculative commodity.

Land can never be a speculative commodity because the cost of land is in fact a huge part of the cost of housing.

Between 50 to 70% of all newly built housing, for example, comes from the cost of land, not construction, because it varies from country to country.

But if countries don't get the price of land under control, they can never ensure affordable housing.

So from that perspective, my appeal to Spain and other governments is to say, address the structural problems, Don't let the housing crisis be exploited by the wrong people in your in your societies, and make sure that a vulnerability analysis is applied so that people don't become homeless.

And if people become homeless, they are immediately rehoused with full rights.

I hope that this becomes possible.

[Other language spoken]

Yes, hi, Thank you for the briefing and thank you for taking my question.

I wanted to ask you to just say a little bit more about the domicide issue when it comes to Gaza, especially and the Board of Peace, because I, I think I understand and what you're saying, but they're, when they're talking about building up lots of housing units, but these are probably not destined for the people who actually lived there previously.

I was just wondering if you could say just a little bit more about how that that is linked to international law or opposed to international law.

And then I had another question.

I think I heard you say that climate action should not come at the cost of vulnerable people losing their homes.

Could you say more about that?

I understand how climate change is impacting vulnerable people, but how is climate action doing so?

[Other language spoken]

Yes, both are very important.

Domicile, of course, is a term that I gave to mass destruction of homes.

Mass destruction of homes is not a new phenomenon in at least modern conflicts.

For example, in World War 21 thinks of the mass destruction of homes in Dresden or in London for example, or the Tokyo bombings that incinerated vast neighbourhoods.

Of course, the use of atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki that wiped out housing entirely over cities.

Destruction of housing has also been seen in conflicts in contemporary times.

We have seen that in the utter annihilation of Maria poll, for example, by Russia, and of course most tellingly the because it has been so visibly documented day after day.

The mass destruction of homes in Gaza, where close to 92% of all homes have been destroyed.

And in fact, the image of Gaza under conflict, especially media and public images, is often simply a vast sea of rubble gas.

Gaza increasingly is equivalent to rubble, a Kingdom of rubble.

And unfortunately, this is the way in which modern conflict plays out.

And it is primarily because of the urbanisation of societies.

More people live in urban areas in more densely built environments, which means that when conflict breaks out between two sides, the the use of, especially with the use of bombs and you know, with the use of aerial warfare, the destruction of military targets, which are deeply embedded in urban areas, unfortunately leads to mass destruction of housing.

In fact, I would say we are already seeing that in the context of the ongoing conflict in the Middle East with Iran and the destruction of homes.

And let's just remember that both these countries, both Iran and Israel, have deeply embedded military assets in urban areas.

For example, in the case of Israel, the vast military infrastructure that exists for command and control is right under the city of Tel Aviv.

So tomorrow there is a destruction of the city of Tel Aviv, which I hope never happens.

It will actually.

It could be justified by some, totally illegally, as a destruction of valid military objects.

In fact, that's part of the way in which the argument was made about the mass destruction of housing in Gaza, that under every home, it was alleged, was a military infrastructure.

If we go with that logic, which unfortunately might turn out to be true in many conflicts, then you could actually basically destroy all homes everywhere whenever conflicts break out.

Why do we even bother to build so many homes if at the minute a conflict breaks out, we're willing to destroy everything that it took decades for to be built?

And families have spent decades hoping and struggling hard to to to build the most valuable things that most people have in their lives, which is their homes.

I think that this is an unsustainable path.

And that's why in my domicile report, I call for this phenomenon to be named, shamed and stopped.

We have to name it for what it is.

We don't even have a name for it.

Mass destruction of home.

Why is that?

[Other language spoken]

And we need to take steps to stop it.

And the taking steps to stop it starts with the way in which so many conflicts are breaking out.

We need more action towards peace and the way in which conflict is waged.

If, God forbid, conflict, despite all efforts that establishing peace does happen, why are we fighting the wars as we do?

For example, the use of our, you know, artificial intelligence in targeting.

If we saw that, for example, in the 1st 24 hours, 24 to 48 hours of the conflict against Iran, more than 1000 targets were hit.

Now, from reports I have seen, it seems that an artificial intelligence platform was used to select targets, including the geographical coordinates.

That's the reason why targeting becomes so much faster.

We saw that in the first two months of the conflict in Gaza.

And I pointed out in pointed this out the use of artificial intelligence for targeting in my report on domicide, for example.

So there are many things that are going wrong about housing.

They're going wrong too fast, too rapidly.

We need to put a stop to this.

With regard to your second question about climate, unfortunately the consequences of climate change have profound negative impacts on homes.

Sea level rise, imagine, and this is a real threat to, for example, small island states who could entirely disappear and not just homes, but the whole countries could disappear.

But we also have increasing floods, we have increasing wildfires.

We have repeated catastrophes that make people very vulnerable and make it very difficult for them to keep their homes.

But unfortunately, there is also a dark side to the way in which we think we are fighting against climate change.

For example, a dominant approach that has emerged to fight climate change is to, for example, promote schemes like carbon credits to monetize the risk that climate change creates, and then to think that the market mechanism will somehow solve it.

Now, the evidence for that by acknowledgement most scholars, is that there isn't any.

But this is actually the dominant belief of elites who think that they're doing something good by fighting climate change.

But what you actually see on the ground is what I see, which is that in the name of carbon credits, indigenous people are living in forests, for example, their homes are burnt and they're evicted from where they live by developing country governments.

Like in the case of this example, I can cite the destruction of the homes of the people living in the Mao forest by Kenya.

Now, in that case, it was again, a classic situation involving a carbon credit agreement with a company in the Middle East that prefers to go through the arrangement in order to be able to monetize the risk of carbon credits.

We are going about tackling climate crisis in exactly the wrong ways.

We cannot solve climate crisis by making more people homeless.

This is not the way to tackle climate crisis and we need to squarely face this.

And I hope there is some awareness about this in the coming years.

[Other language spoken]

Very interesting answers.

I actually, I was going to ask you to say just a little bit more about what you've been seeing on Iran and the war that started in the Middle East when it comes.

I mean, you mentioned the very rapid targeting, but are you seeing that housing has been, you know, disproportionately affected, I guess in Iran, but also Iran has been striking countries all over the region.

So I don't know if you have anything more to say on that.

[Other language spoken]

Just to say it's a little bit too early to offer a comprehensive answer to that.

But the early evidence is, is very worrying with the targeting that I mentioned, but also the retaliation, the response by Iran that I have certainly seen some of the drone attacks that actually primarily target residential towers.

This is partly my broader point that conflict breaks out and the first thing you begin to see in today's world is that people's homes are destroyed right in the 1st 24 to 48 hours.

So which all the more is the reason why the complete failure of the peace and security architecture of the international community, especially the Security Council of the UN, to be able to do anything really to control the increasing outbreak of violence and the destruction of people's homes and their lives is unconscionable.

This is not the way we're going to survive as a species.

This is not the way the planet is going to survive going forward.

I really think that I hope that the Iran crisis stops gathering momentum, that steps are taken to bring it to a full stop as soon as possible, and that parties return to the negotiating table to sort out whatever differences that they have instead of trying to bomb each other and destroy everything that they've taken decades to build.

Thank you to the Special Rapporteur.

Do we have any other questions for Mr Rajagopal?

No, no other questions online.

In that case, we will now close this press conference.

Thank you very much to the Special Rapporteur for being here and participating, and for all of you for joining us.

[Other language spoken]

HRC Press Conference: Special Rapporteur on Housing - 05 March 2026