Context really is everything

Just to say that I prefer this gesture so much more in this context than all the other ones we have gotten used to it in recently.

 

 

Article on HLP rights and durable solutions in GPC Digest

by Rhodri C. Williams

A short piece I wrote on the relationship between ‘housing, land and property’ (HLP) rights and durable solutions for displaced persons has been published in the Global Protection Cluster Digest, vol. 1/2014, and can be accessed in pdf form here. I have also added the last draft before final edits just below.

The thrust of the piece will be pretty familiar to any regular readers of this blog. I’ve been going on about the steady demise of the Pinheiro Principles and their exclusive focus on restitution (over other forms of reparation) for some time now. As precedents like the ECHR Demopoulos decision and humanitarian changes in tack like the IDP Durable Solutions Framework crowded in, it became ever more clear that a more balanced approach was justified.

Indeed, even before the spike in global displacement seen since 2011, growing awareness of the problem of protracted displacement had put local integration front and center in international discussions of durable solutions. Where displacement persists because return is not on the table, continuing to emphasize the future hope of restitution can distract both displaced persons and host communities from practical steps to ameliorate the here and now. Meaning that a more balanced approach was also necessary.

“Endorois decision” update – Kenyan task force appointed

Last Tuesday, Minority Rights Group International Legal Fellow Rebecca Marlin contributed a guest post on the failure of the Government of Kenya to take any meaningful steps to implement the groundbreaking “Endorois decision” issued in 2010 by the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights. However, by Friday, the situation had improved, if only slightly.

My first notice came in a comment to a subsequent post by Sam Marigat, the head of the Endorois Welfare Council, but the news was also quick to make the Kenyan press. While the details remained nebulous, it seemed that the Kenyan Government had finally appointed the task force responsible for looking into the concrete modalities for implementation of the decision.

Today, a hat tip to colleagues at MRG, who have acquired a copy of the appointment order and given their first analysis of it in a press release. While the order is a welcome sign of progress, MRG has noted a number of serious concerns, not least the fact that the task force is not required to consult with the Endorois community, nor is there an Endorois representative included.

Meanwhile, the phrasing of the mandate, which refers to assessing ‘the practicability of restitution’ and ‘the potential environmental impacts on Lake Bogoria… of implementation’ leaves ample room for skepticism. While the appointment of the task force is a necessary and overdue step toward implementation of the ACHPR’s findings, it must be watched carefully to ensure that it does not simply become a means of thwarting them.

As Mr. Marigat pointed out in response to MRG’s original post, the signs have been grimly clear so far:

Our Kenyan government has not demonstrated any iota of commitment to implement the ACHPR recommendations. Some of the Endorois elders who suffered personal injury are either terminally ill or dead. We buried 2 recently.

Controversial World Bank safeguard policies rewrite goes to consultations

by Rhodri C. Williams

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the World Bank’s rollout of a draft set of reworked safeguard policies took little note of a critical petition initiated last month by Inclusive Development International. However, even as the Bank announced a consultation period scheduled to run through the end of November, IDI elaborated on its concerns in a comment in Devex.

Without having yet had time to read through the Bank’s draft, it is difficult not to be concerned by the fundamental nature of the regression indicated by IDI’s criticisms. Elimination of the requirement to prepare advance resettlement plans, removal of substantive monitoring rules, the right to opt out of indigenous peoples safeguards, and an approach so flexible that the World Bank Inspection Panel “would have no hard rules against which to hold the World Bank accountable.” As Nezir Sinani notes in Huffington, the opt-out provision alone could undo a real – but fragile – sea change in the recognition of indigenous rights in parts of Africa.

Its hard to imagine what progressive innovations could offset the negative effects of all the above, but the Bank’s plug for the new draft is both disarmingly bullish and alarmingly bland, checking off all the catchphrases without giving any meaningful indications of the actual changes involved:

Through the revision of our environmental and social safeguard policies, the World Bank is ramping up its standards to ensure the delivery of an environmental and social framework which is more efficient and comprehensive; includes a strengthened approach to the management of environmental and social risks that will support sustainable development through standards that are clear to those impacted by the projects we finance, those who implement, and those holding us to account.

It is no secret that the Bank’s public statements tend to run more progressive than its practice, and that there are real dilemmas that the Bank faces in trying to live up to its own standards. But to gut the standards while claiming to strengthen them would not only be wrong, but downright Orwellian.

 

Bosnia 2013 – a tale of two pictures

by Rhodri C. Williams

As the ‘Arab uprising’ countries are now learning the hard way, building a better future is a process that can often be expected to last just as long as surviving one’s bad past did. It is a bitter pill for local populations to swallow, particularly in countries like Libya where the euphoria of having slipped the grasp of a seemingly immortal psychopath is being ground down by the dispiriting business of overcoming his legacy. Its a lesson that well-meaning international observers seem to have an even harder time digesting, let alone anticipating (despite the fact that we have all been down this road before and should know by now that there are no shortcuts).

So thats what made the taste of Bosnia’s recent qualification for the World Cup so sweet. After years of stagnant ethnic deadlock, this event seemed like something that in retrospect would be seen as an awakening from a prolonged coma. A pulse had been detected last summer when ordinary citizens finally revolted against a politics of not re-attaching your own nose to spite the other guy’s face, and then had fizzled out as disillusion and ordinary life set back in. Then suddenly, the first stirrings of something big as the Bosnian team crept closer to Brazil, beating Slovakia in September and being rewarded with its unprecedented adoption as ‘our’ team by the staunchly nationalist Glas Srpske.

And then the breakthrough – and talk of a long-overdue ‘national success story‘ – as the ‘Dragons’ swept Lithuania before them and qualified last October. Suddenly, it seemed as if Bosnia would be redefined by pictures like this, an ordinary family celebrating the victory of a highly non-ordinary state. The new Bosnian flag that rumors attributed to an OHR intern with basic photoshop skills – and that wags said looked like the logo on a cereal box – was to flap off to Brazil with all its other more time-honored fellows. The turning of a page at last.

A number of other factors spoke for normalization in Bosnia and perhaps the entire region. Warts and all, the first Bosnian post-war census was completed at around the same time of the qualifying match. Off in Kosovo, a new EULEX head seemed to take a firmer approach to corruption, even as the territory lurched toward shambolic municipal elections that were nevertheless the first ever to be supported by both Pristina and Belgrade. However, it is hard to overstate the horrors that beset the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s, and the extent to which they will continue to compete with the fragile new normality in defining the country’s image.   

Vivianna Nyroos

On a note both personal and professional, I would like to mark the passing of a dear friend and colleague, Vivianna Nyroos.

Vivianna’s life tracked my own in many ways – she grew up on Åland in my wife’s generation and both came to work in Bosnia in my generation of post-Cold War idealists. Her subsequent career in Copenhagen was subject to the same dilemmas as mine in Stockholm, the balancing of the need to live where the family is and to work where the issues are, the coming to terms with the possibilities and limitations of expat life. But on top of these issues, Vivianna battled recurrent cancer with a quiet, cheerful determination that was wondrous to behold. Yesterday it took her away.

Vivianna had long worked for MSF in Copenhagen but just taken on a challenging new job with the Rehabilitation and Research Centre for Torture Victims. She and her family had moved out of a tiny attic apartment in Copenhagen to more spacious digs and begun renovating her family’s summer place on Åland. She had built a life and her untimely removal from it is an unspeakably cruel blow to her and everyone around her.

 

Dark Lord of the Sith joins the global land rush

Hat tip to Greg Kitt for alerting TN readers to the alarming news that the Dark Side of the Force has joined sovereign funds and unscrupulous private investors in the rush for large-scale investment in developing countries’ land. In this case, it seems that Darth Vader, the Dark Lord of the Sith, needed to pick up some cheap land in a quick and non-transparent deal to park his intergalactic TIE fighter. Having been alerted to a “decision by city authorities to grant attractive land plots along the sea coast to a group of people for free” in Odessa (Ukraine), Reuters reports that the terrifying fallen Jedi knight arrived at the municipal building to claim his due. For the video version here, see here. And, while we are on the lighter side, for some utterly gratuitous footage of Lord Vader behaving badly in the Death Star cafeteria (care of Eddie Izzard and an anonymous lego genius), see here.

Week in links – week 44/2011 – restitution in Libya, privatization in Cuba, assimilation in Israel

I’m a little behind this week having been in Cyprus, where I participated in the launch of the paper on property issues I co-wrote with Ayla Gürel for PRIO. The local feedback was very helpful as we are planning to expand the scope of inquiry a bit beyond the fallout of the Demopoulos case in the coming months.

Much of interest from the net this week, including one of the first really good reports on the transitional housing, land and property (HLP) issues in post-revolution Libya from the Guardian. This new article goes well beyond the expensive but relatively tractable reconstruction issues described by BBC last week and enters into the far more fraught territory of what to do about the great transfer of assets that resulted from the Ghaddafi regime’s selective nationalization of property.

Quite a few familiar dilemmas arise, including lurking historical claims (in this case, those of expelled Jews), multiple subsequent purchases by third parties, weak courts, unclear rules, the suspicious 1982 destruction of the land registry, and the fact that the expropriations had (in many cases) a genuinely distributive element, meaning that reversing them would disproportionately worsen the situation of marginalized groups.

In the area of belatedly getting with the times, the New York Times reports that Cuba has now formally adopted a new property law allowing far less restricted transactions in homes than was previously the case (see earlier observations on these developments here). After decades of state control, no one seems to be able to predict where this will go, although some positive economic affects and quick attempts to buy in to the property market by exile Cubans seem like safe bets.

In the area of never getting with the times, the Guardian reports that Israel has proposed a bill to allow the near wholesale resettlement of Bedouin nomads from (what remains of) their traditional territories in the Negev desert to planned new towns. All in the name of modernisation and progress, all undertaken without consulting those affected or paying any heed to the fact that previously forcibly urbanized Bedouins have hardly benefited. Very 1960s. A brief excerpt from the article reads like a compendium of discredited colonial and post-colonial assimilation policies:

Before 1948, the Bedouin tribes lived and grazed their animals on much of the Negev, claiming ancestral rights to the land. In the following decades, the state of Israel took over almost all of the land; the Bedouin lost more than 3,200 land ownership cases in the Israeli courts in the early 1970s, rejected mainly on the grounds there was no proper documentation. Now the Bedouin are claiming ownership of about 5% of the Negev as traditional tribal lands.

Three years ago, the government commissioned a retired judge, Eliezer Goldberg, to make recommendations for dealing with the Bedouin. He advised that many of their villages should be recognised, acknowledging their “general historic ties” to the land.

A committee chaired by the planning policy chief, Ehud Prawer, was tasked with looking at how to implement Goldberg’s recommendations, and proposed the immediate transfer to the state of 50% of the land claimed by the Bedouin, minimal compensation for the remaining land with severe exclusions and the demolition of 35 unrecognised villages. The Bedouin were neither represented on nor consulted by the committee.

As my soapbox is only so big, I’ll leave aside the issue of Israel’s apparently retaliatory expansion of its West Bank settlements this week.

And a last note, the Guardian also reports on the aftermath of the Dale Farm evictions in the UK (see previous WiL)

Call for papers – World Bank 2012 Conference on Land and Poverty

Many thanks to Greg Kitt for alerting me to the call for papers recently announced for next year’s annual World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty:

Under the general theme of “Land governance in a rapidly changing environment”, the 2012 conference will focus on innovative ways of dealing with key aspects of land governance in the context of structural change and economic transformation in a pro-poor and gender-sensitive way. These include agricultural investment and productivity growth, climate change and carbon finance, decentralized resource management, land use planning, urban expansion, and dealing with the consequences of or preventing conflict and disaster.

Abstracts are due by October 31…

Week in links – Week 37/2011: Palestinian statehood and other matters

With Mahmoud Abbas’ (by all accounts rather persuasive) affirmation today that Palestine would seek full membership in the UN, the stage is set for a showdown in the most dramatic and controversial attempt to exercise the right to self-determination in some time. This development has been bemoaned by a ‘pro-Palestinian anti-statehood’ school of thought perhaps best expressed in a recent legal opinion by Oxford professor Guy Goodwin-Gill. The New York Times editorial page and other observers have also raised concerns that a vote for statehood will also derail the possibility of negotiations entirely, delaying yet further a sustainable end to the conflict. And as noted by Robert M. Danin at Foreign Affairs, the decision to seek de jure status may also lead to the abandonment of a project of de facto state building that appeared to be working:

By focusing on state-building, the PA had improved living conditions and strengthened security for Palestinians. All along, one of its aims was to create a peaceful and conducive environment for negotiations, rendering Israel’s occupation unnecessary and ultimately unjustifiable. And indeed, slowly and without fanfare, Israelis have taken steps to lift the burden of the occupation on Palestinians, opening the West Bank a little more to the movement of people and goods and allowing Palestinian security forces to expand their control over larger parts of the West Bank. The under-the-radar approach made such tangible improvements possible.

In fact, the Israeli response has been to warn of the ‘harsh and grave consequences’ of UN recognition of Palestine, fuelling speculation that this could lead to outright annexation of parts of the West Bank. And lest anyone forget the complications involved in the territorial question, David Makovsky has provided a fascinating graphic of the current proposals as an Op-Ed in the New York Times.

Meantime, perhaps the parties to the Middle East conflict may be inspired by Belgium, which has finally resolved a deadlock focused on three contested municipalities near Brussels and may get a government 15 months after elections.

In less uplifting news, the ramifications of the oil pipeline fire in a Nairobi slum that killed scores of residents continue to unfold, with competent officials passing blame back and forth. To make a long story short, it reads like the fact section in the Öneryildiz case before the European Court of Human Rights several years back, in which Turkey was held responsible for violations of the right to life and property for having failed to take reasonable steps to prevent the foreseeable explosion of a garbage dump located near a slum. Perhaps some jurisprudence for the fledgling African Court of Human and People’s Rights to consider.

Finally, the New York Times provides some timely political analysis of the land struggle currently shaking the Bajo Aguán valley in northern Honduras.