(Hong Kong, December 5, 2007) Baseer Naveed, senior researcher for South Asia for the Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC), is the recipient of the 2007 Housing Rights Defender Award presented annually by the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE) in Geneva, Switzerland.
In addition to the Housing Rights Defender Award, COHRE is also presenting tomorrow the Housing Rights Protector Award and the Housing Rights Violator Awards for 2007 in Geneva. The Housing Rights Protector Award is being given this year to the municipal government of Naga in the Philippines for its Kaantabay sa Kauswagan (Partners in Development) Programme while the Asian recipients of the 2007 Housing Rights Violator Awards are the city of Beijing and the Beijing Organising Committee for the Olympic Games (BOCOG) for its eviction of 1.25 million residents to build facilities for the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the Burmese government for its displacement of more than one million civilians since 1962 under a series of military regimes.
COHRE has presented its housing rights awards each year since 2002 to raise awareness of housing rights issues, reward those who have sought to protect and promote the human
right to housing and “name and shame” those guilty of particularly serious housing rights violations.
According to COHRE, the Housing Rights Defender Award is given annually to “an individual who is independent of any political or government affiliation who has shown outstanding commitment to the realisation of housing rights for all people.”
Naveed received the award for his work to protect the housing rights of people displaced by the Lyri Expressway in his native Pakistan where he worked prior to March 2006 when he joined the staff of the AHRC, a regional human rights non-governmental organisation (NGO) in Hong Kong.
In 2002, the Pakistani government began displacing about 300,000 impoverished people in 49 communities to construct the expressway along both sides of the Lyri River in Karachi that would connect the port in the city with the national highway system.
“When I visited this area,” Naveed recalls, “people were living in filth; people were sleeping on rocks in the river. The people were not treated like human beings.”
The Pakistani government refused to compensate those who would lose their homes for this highway project, however.
Naveed and other members of his organisation in Karachi, the Action Committee for Civic Problems (ACCP), began organising the people who faced eviction, demanding that the government compensate them for the loss of their homes. They insisted that each family be given an 80-square-yard plot of land and 50,000 rupees (US$815) to construct a new home. In addition, a three-month notice must be given to the people before they are relocated, the organisers of the movement said, and the resettlement area must have such utilities as water, electricity and cooking gas as well as schools, parks, marketplaces, bus stops and industrial zones before the people would move.
The Pakistan government agreed to these demands in July 2002–the first successful challenge to the government of President Pervez Musharraf and the first successful defence of people’s housing rights as the government for the first time agreed to a resettlement plan for people displaced by a development project. This victory furthermore set a precedent: people displaced from their homes for a development project in the future could expect to receive compensation and a finalised resettlement plan before they moved.
“This was a big movement, but no blood was spilled,” says Naveed. “We kept it very peaceful. We didn’t allow people to confront the police.”
Naveed, however, personally paid a price for his activism: he was arrested twice by the authorities, and his son Faraz disappeared, was tortured and killed in November 2004. Moreover, his other son and wife were beaten.
Naveed believes this violence was directed at his family by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) in retaliation for his work to organise the people affected by the Lyri Expressway, a project of the national government initially costing 5 billion rupees (US$81.55 million).
In reflecting on his award and his work, Naveed said, “People should have alternatives. It is the right of the people to have housing.”
People though have challenged this claim, he said, asking, “Why do people have these rights?”
Naveed’s reply: “You go sleep on the streets, and then you’ll feel that shelter is very much a right.”
