The Right to Housing
FEANTSA and its members are committed to understanding homelessness as a situation that deprives individuals of fundamental rights, including the right to housing. Reducing overall homelessness and increasing access to housing are activities that help guarantee the right to housing, while the lack of stable housing prevents individuals from exercising other fundamental rights.
FEANTSA and its members engage in the protection of the right to housing primarily through transnational exchanges, direct advocacy and research:
Housing Rights Watch
Housing Rights Watch is a transnational network of activists, academics and NGOs from across Europe that monitor and promote the right to housing by providing legal advice, advocacy support, networking opportunities and housing resources:
Legal: access a jurisprudence database with explanations and citations from European jurisprudence affecting housing rights.
Advocacy: join campaigns, such as our current effort to draw attention to the criminalisation of poverty, and supports efforts to defend housing rights through collective complaints.
Networking: find and share ideas and actions at annual conferences, whose proceedings are available in text and audio formats. HRW also supports and hosts social media content, like podcasts and graphic art.
Resources: use tools that support a rights based approach to housing.)
Detail on FEANTSA v. FRANCE 39/2006
FEANTSA has successfully filed two collective complaints before the Council of European Committee of Social Rights: the first against, filed against France in 2006, sought to hold the French state responsible for the country’s on-going housing crises. The second, filed against Slovenia in 2008, sought to protect 13,000 tenants who were facing eviction under a Slovenian housing code reform project.
In both cases, FEANTSA used the social rights platform of the Council of Europe in order to bring, for the first time, cases against member States for failing to recognize and protect the right to housing. The Committee of Ministers’ resolutions in the cases brought international attention and support to national housing crises and provided a foundation for local efforts across Europe to stand up for the right to housing.
Housing Rights Expert Group
The Housing Rights Expert Group works under the mandate of the Housing Working Group, which addresses the role housing, and the lack of housing, plays in homelessness. The Expert Group brings together knowledge leaders from EU countries to help guide the Working Group’s policy and research agendas.
For more information, contact Samara Jones.
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