Oh find me a home...

THOMAS ROSE: ANALYSIS
Should having a home be a human right?
September 22, 2006
Let's face it. The homeless are not an attractive people. It is hard to be around them. They can look frightening, they can smell bad, and they most often want something from you. They make us uncomfortable, fearful and, yes, guilty.

Why don't they just all go away? But where?

In the past, some cities have tried to encourage the homeless to move on, even offering to pay their transportation and put a few dollars in their pockets. But that doesn't solve the problem, it only shuffles it about. And with signs suggesting the number of homeless will grow, cities everywhere are grappling with what to do with them.

Montreal recently banned overnight stays in public squares. Penalties include hefty fines and even jail.

Victoria has a similar bylaw, prohibiting the erection of any shelter in a public place as well as sleeping overnight in downtown parks.

Housing advocates say criminalizing the homeless this way is a disturbing and perhaps immoral trend. Rather than penalizing the homeless, they argue, homelessness itself should be declared illegal, and having shelter should be elevated to a basic human right, alongside freedom of religion and the right to vote.

The notion that having a home is a right is gaining some currency around the globe, not to mention in the corners of some of the most frigid cities in Canada. The right to housing is already included in several legally binding international documents.

The Vancouver Declaration on Human Settlements, for example, sets out the obligations of governments to provide adequate housing for all. The UN's Habitat Agenda and Plan of Action created a global action plan that confirmed the legal status of the human right to adequate housing. And the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, a treaty which Canada has ratified, obliges all states to "recognize the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living, including adequate food, clothing and housing."

Many of these agreements are designed to deal largely with Third World problems that, according to the UN, have left upwards of 100 million people without adequate shelter. But in the context of a developed country such as Canada, the question has to be asked: How far do these rights go?


A new footing

One clue might be found in a ruling last spring by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in Los Angeles. The court ruled 2-1 that L.A. cannot arrest people for sleeping or even sitting on public sidewalks at certain times of the day because that would be tantamount to "cruel and unusual punishment," which is banned by the U.S. Constitution.

That ruling would appear to put the legal status of basic shelter on an entirely new footing — from the lofty rhetoric of international agreements to the determined reality of constitutional law.

For L.A., and presumably other American cities, it also meant the courts were telling city officials that if they wanted to remove the indigent from the streets then they had to provide the means to accommodate them.

Homeless advocates in B.C. are now before the courts there making a similar argument and are hoping for a similar ruling. Seeking to turn the tables on those who would ban the homeless from sleeping in public places, these advocates argue that the bylaws enacted by the City of Victoria violate the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

So long as there is a greater number of homeless than the number of beds available in shelters, the reasoning goes, sleeping restrictions in public places should not be placed on the homeless.

This is a familiar argument to the people of Scotland. After a flurry of similar court challenges throughout the 1980s, during a recession and period of record homelessness, the Scottish Parliament passed legislation declaring all levels of government were obliged to provide housing to all citizens.

Recent amendments have upgraded that legislation so that city councils are now obliged to provide permanent accommodation to anyone officially assessed as homeless. As a result, tens of thousands have been given shelter, tens of thousands more are on waiting lists and yet as recently as this spring, homeless advocates in Scotland declared it isn't enough.

In the end, perhaps, the fact of shelter as a human need may not mean that governments must provide each one of their citizens with land, four walls and a roof. But recent developments suggest that the status quo is no longer enough.