Housing rights - the new benchmarks for housing policy in Europe?

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.