This chapter describes the human rights approach to housing and analyses it from a critical social policy perspective. The first section outlines the importance of housing as a human right. The distinctiveness of housing is then explored and a third section provides a case study of a community advocacy group working in the area of housing rights. Finally, it discusses the prospects and limits of a human rights-based approach to housing, drawing on critical social policy perspectives.

Housing and human rights

Housing is a fundamental need, addressing the unavoidable and ongoing necessity for shelter and the basic requirement for a home (Ó Broin, 2019: 149– 159; Kenna, 2011). As well as physical security and wellbeing, adequate housing contributes to psychological well-being by fulfilling a sense of personal space, autonomy and privacy. However, housing per se does not guarantee this, as in the case of domestic violence or child abuse (Hohmann, 2013). Housing, necessarily located in a particular geographical space, may both create and affirm a sense of social and cultural community. The links between (the right to) housing and (the right to) other ‘goods’ – for example, security and dignity, privacy, a family life, social inclusion, cultural diversity and health, and non-discrimination – are many and varied. For these reasons, a right to housing is seen as a crucially important human right.

Historically, key statements on the right to housing are contained in two documents authored by the United Nations. The United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) states, in Article 25 (i), that everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for health and well-being of themselves and their families, and includes housing as an example of what such an adequate standard of living would comprise. The United Nations’ International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) (UN General Assembly, 1966) asserts, in Article 11 (1), the centrality of the right to adequate housing as a precursor to the enjoyment of all other economic, social and cultural rights. The UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1991) goes on to set out seven essential components of adequate housing:

• • Legal security of tenure against forced eviction and harassment.

• • Availability of services such as safe drinking water, sanitation, heating and light, and refuse disposal.