Cardboard Boxes and Plastic Tents — Housing Rights as a Human Right

In Afghanistan, political turmoil and war have displaced and broken many of the country’s families and lives, forcing people to live in abandoned houses or buildings. In a photograph taken in 2002, an Afghan mother prepares food on the cement kitchen floor of a deserted house for her young son. The walls are peeling and vandalized, the windows covered in pieces of cardboard — and the house is little refuge from the world outside.

Is the protection of homes, and the right to housing, a human right? In “The Face of Human Rights,” the editors state that the “right to housing is a right to adequate accommodation.”

Rights to prevent the infringement of private housing are essential in upholding human dignity and privacy.

In the United States alone, there are at least 700,000 people without a home, and in Latin America, there are 40 million children estimated to be living on the streets. The right to a protected home is overlooked, but it is a right that is fundamental to living as dignified human beings.

In Las Norias, Spain, Morroccan laborers live in plastic and carboard tents, sleeping and cooking in the flimsy walls as best they can. In another image, an aging Japanese man slowly settles himself into a sturdy cardboard box, hangers hanging from the cardboard sides, the lids of the box propped up to lengthen the walls.

Homes in many countries are no longer places of safety, but places of danger and discrimination instead. In 1992, one man described the destruction of his neighborhood during the Serbian Siege of Bijelhina.

He said, “One of the men in the Yugoslav army uniform then sprayed the house with machine gun fire and the second uniformed soldier threw one hand grenade through the window and one through the door. The grenades must have fallen near the gas bottles because the house exploded and burned to the ground.”

Although the right to housing is not absolute, it is still crucial for governments to protect its people and the homes they live in. In Sri Lanka, Mary Nona, a 37-year-old woman, leaves her home everynight around 5:00 or 6:00 pm to another village in order to avoid the possible night attacks from the Tamil Tiger insurgency. She has been doing this for ten years, taking her pillow and gathering her things for the night away from home. “This is our life,” she says. “We are used to it.”

For more on "The Face of Human Rights" follow this link.

About the Editors

Walter Kälin is a Member of the UN Human Rights Committee since 2003 and is Representative of the UN Secretary General on the Human Rights of Internally Displaced Persons since 2004. He is also a Professor of constitutional and international Law at the Faculty of Law of the University of Bern, Switzerland.

Judith Wyttenbach is an academic assistant in the Institute of Public Law at Bern University. She teaches at the Lucerne School of Social Work and has written and spoekn on women's and children's rights.