Abstract:
Rights to housing are regularly proposed as the solution to poor
housing and homelessness by advocates and campaigning organizations.
This approach is viewed as having the critical international acclaim
and legal clarity to cut through the Gordian knots of political
wrangling, resource deficiencies, programmatic and policy conflicts,
and theoretical dissonance in housing approaches. Of course, most
(States) have ratified rights to housing at an international level in a
range of instruments, from the United Nations (UN) to the Council of
Europe. Implementation of these rights is obliged and promoted within
both a programmatic approach, as well as a violations and remedies
approach (opportunities for litigation in the event of breaches). Each
ratifying State regularly produces monitoring reports for the relevant
international treaty body on how these rights are being given effect,
legally, at policy level, and programmatically. However, in the age of
New Public Management (NPM) there are regular attempts to reduce
such internationally established human rights norms to the level of
nonlegal approaches, such as customer charters rights to ¿participation¿
and administrative complaint systems.
