The Property Rights of Refugees and Internally Displaced Persons: Beyond Restitution pursues a rigorous examination of the various ways in which the protection of housing and property rights can contribute to durable solutions to displacement.
The Property Rights of Refugees and Internally Displaced Persons: Beyond Restitution pursues a rigorous examination of the various ways in which the protection of housing and property rights can contribute to durable solutions to displacement.
Despite the fact that there are up to 25 million internally displaced persons around the world, their plight is still little known. Like refugees, internally displaced persons have been forced to leave their homes because of war and human rights abuses, but they have not left their country. This has major consequences in terms of the protection available to them. This 2005 book aims to offer a clear and easily accessible overview of this important humanitarian and human rights challenge. In contrast with other books on the topic, it provides an objective evaluation of UN efforts to protect the internally displaced. It will be of interest to all those involved with the internally displaced, as well as anyone seeking to gain an overall understanding of this complex issue.
The breadth of the restitution standards found within this volume, combined with selected examples of case law and other materials, is a clear indication that a right to housing, land, and property restitution for refugees and displaced persons has emerged within the global legal domain.
In the first Commentary on the United Nations Principles on Housing and Property Restitution for Refugees and Displaced Persons – known colloquially as the Pinheiro Principles – Khaled Hassine and Scott Leckie outline the restitution rights of persons who have faced forced displacement and the loss of their homes, lands and properties. The Commentary compiles and analyzes in considerable detail the legal contents of the Pinheiro Principles - a consolidated international instrument generated by the United Nations in 2005 to provide a solid normative framework on these questions and which legal duties exist for states and the international community to secure them. The book will be of vital interest for all actors concerned with applying restitution rights in practice.
This book explores the possibilities of understanding the concept of climate refugees in order to ascribe to a consensual agreement that climate refugees are evident and this situation is a reality. A framework to study both empirically and theoretically is presented in a detailed manner so that it may become a resource for understanding the challenges of climate refugees. Through discussion and analysis the book presents potential answers to such questions as: ● Why has the international system been so short-sighted and has not given importance to the problems of climate migrants and refugees? ● How to identify a climate refugee? ● How do you justify a climate refugee or a migrant? ● What are internally displaced people? Should we call them just refugees? The book covers the interdisciplinary nature of climate refugees and the perspectives of social science. The empirical findings provides an edge to holistically understanding climate refugees. This book discusses the concept of, what really is a climate refugee, and the necessary factors to make it an important part of the climate discourse. The legality of the term is missing in international parlance, and the academic discourse should provide the necessary critique required for the evolution of the subject under study. Therefore, the major objective of the book is to make the subject of climate migration known to all.
The Idea of Home in Law: Displacement and Dispossession explores an important set of legal and policy issues surrounding the concepts of home and homelessness, taking a growing area of legal scholarship into the new arena of human rights and international law. The collection considers the ideas concerning home - both in the sense of the dwelling place as a special type of property, and territorial claims to homeland - which underpin many contemporary legal problems, by examining a range of contexts where people are displaced or dispossessed from their homes. The essays focusing on dispossession consider themes ranging from mortgage and rent arrears in the UK to responses to the foreclosure crisis in the USA, and from eviction for the purposes of economic development in South Africa to the exclusion of asylum seekers from the UK's social housing and welfare provision, and within the framework of the European Convention on Human Rights. The displacement theme, meanwhile, examines transnational 'home' issues from the experiences of exiles and refugees in areas of conflict to the impact of the broader context of economic, social and cultural rights on attempts to protect housing and home through international law. At the heart of each essay the contributors, experts from across the fields of law, policy, and housing rights, examine the circumstances in which displacement and dispossession take place, and reconsider how law and policy respond to such circumstances with a particular focus on the impact of loss of home for the human person. At a time of particular and increasing concern about security of tenure and the role of law and policy in protecting people who are vulnerable to forced eviction, The Idea of Home in Law presents a bold opportunity to raise questions about the 'rights' and norms associated with housing and home, and to generate new insights for scholarship and for national and international policy debates concerning displacement and dispossession.
The right of refugees and internally displaced persons to return to their homes and places of residence in their country or place of origin following a refugee crisis has evolved significantly as a human rights norm over the past decade. Not only have several commentators and UN human rights bodies stressed the need for international peace-keeping operations to address effectively issues of housing and property rights, the past decade has seen international peace-keeping operations recognize these issues as a central component of peace- building efforts, and as indispensable to the promotion of peace, prosperity and development in post-conflict settings. Legal mechanisms mandated to address property issues and disputes have been established in particular national contexts to assist refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) to return to their homes, and there has emerged an explicit right of refugees and IDPs to restoration of their property rights, or compensation where restoration is no longer feasible. This is in stark contrast to the treatment of displaced persons over past centuries, whereby the homes and lands of those displaced, who were not on the side of the victors or those who remained in power, were lost forever. The aim of this book is to provide a comprehensive overview of property restitution in post-conflict Kosovo. It commences with a consideration of the origins and evolution of the right to property restitution for refugees and internally displaced persons. It provides the reader with an outline of the situation in Kosovo prior to the 1999 armed conflict, the developments that led to the international property related intervention, and the subsequent establishment of the HPD/HPCC (the Housing and Property Directorate and its independent quasi judicial body the Housing and Property Claims Commission). The international property-related intervention is considered from a legal, institutional, operational and administrative perspective. It also provides a comprehensive outline of the jurisprudence of the Commission and concludes with an account of the lessons learned from the process over its six years of operations. This is a two volume set.