By Melina Holder
International Human Rights Law recognizes the right to adequate housing, as outlined in both the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (UN Special Rapporteur 3). Adequate housing is broadly defined as the right to live somewhere in security, peace, and dignity, and with protection against forced evictions (UN Special Rapporteur 3). In the humanitarian emergency context, housing, land, and property (HLP) rights are a collective bundle of laws, standards, and principles that aim to protect the human right to adequate housing and to ensure that people can establish themselves in a chosen location without fear or threat of displacement, an especially important consideration for internally displaced peoples (IDPs), refugees, and migrants (International Organization for Migration (IOM) 5). This certainty is known as “security of tenure.” Security of tenure enables people affected by displacement to recover from their experiences, plan next steps, seek economic opportunities, and if desired, establish roots in a community. As such, possessing security of tenure is critical to realizing the right to adequate housing and supporting HLP rights, and tenure security should be a top priority for humanitarian assistance.
Since 2015, Latin America has seen an unprecedented outflow of refugees and migrants from the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela (Venezuela), forced to flee their country due to severe economic and institutional crises, citizen insecurity, human rights abuses, and political unrest. As of September 2022, estimates from the R4V Inter-Agency Coordination Platform for Refugees and Migrants from Venezuela show approximately 7.1 million Venezuelan refugees and migrants have been displaced worldwide, with upwards of 5.9 million, or over 80 percent, displaced within Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) largely in Colombia and Perú (R4V 2022). With these numbers, the Venezuelan refugee crisis has become the second-largest external displacement crisis in the world.
The uncertainty of legal and documentation status, lack of protections, and difficulty overcoming perceptions held by settled communities impacts the ability for Venezuelan migrants and refugees to access housing with tenure security and claim any type of HLP rights. In addition, with limited job opportunities and social networks, paying rent has become a major challenge. This is significant as Venezuelan migrants and refugees primarily seek rental arrangements for housing (R4V 2022). A survey conducted by R4V found that out of 1,200 households interviewed in LAC, 89 percent are renting a room or an apartment (R4V 2022). Of those renting, 77 percent have only verbal rental agreements, without any documentation or more concrete assurances, resulting in high levels of eviction and eviction threats (R4V 2022). In that survey, 42 percent of households interviewed, 80 percent of which were women, had experienced eviction, and of those who had not been evicted, 72 percent had received an eviction notice (R4V 2022).
The inability to pay rent was the primary reason that Venezuelan migrants and refugees faced eviction and eviction threats in another of R4V’s regional surveys, on eviction of refugees and migrants from Venezuela (R4V 2022). According to informal interviews with shelter administrators conducted for this research, indirect eviction is also very common. This involves the landlord shutting off access to water and/or electricity or taking other measures to make the living situation so uncomfortable the families are forced to leave before the end of their agreement. Sexual harassment and violence has also been cited by women as a reason for being forced to leave before the end of their rental terms. Moreover, the challenges migrants and refugees face in regularizing their status often prevents them from asking for or engaging in formal rental contracts, claiming HLP and renters’ rights, or seeking justice for rental violations.
The impacts of evictions and overall insecurity of tenure has devastating impacts, with homelessness as one of the main consequences (R4V 2022). This, of course, leads to other major threats, such as sexual and other forms of violence, social isolation, extreme physical and mental impacts, and in some cases, increased risk of being recruited by criminal groups (International Crisis Group 2022). While homelessness can have severe and potentially dire impacts on all people, the risks are exceptional for people who identify as women or LGBTQIA+, people with children, and persons with disabilities.
Rental assistance has been the primary method through which humanitarian actors support displaced migrants and refugees from Venezuela in accessing adequate housing in urban and peri-urban areas. For rental assistance to truly be effective in providing security of tenure, it must be linked with community sensitization campaigns, education and advocacy surrounding the use of documented rental agreements, and additional livelihoods and protection programming. Further, it is critical that pre-project assessments incorporate comprehensive security of tenure assessments to understand relationship dynamics between incoming and host communities, power dynamics between tenants and property owners and influences in tenure arrangements, presence of populations with disabilities and factors that disproportionately affect people who identify as women and LGBTQIA+, and under what circumstances rental agreements are being violated. Understanding the security of tenure context and how rental assistance can meet the specific needs of all populations within a community will be critical to supporting displaced migrants and refugees in realizing their human right to adequate housing.
Melina Holder is a second-year Master’s student in the Master of Development Practice Program in the College of Natural Resources at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on housing, land, and property rights for migrants, refugees, and internally displaced persons. She received a Tinker Field Research Grant from the Center for Latin American Studies in 2022.
References
International Crisis Group.(2022). Hard Times in a Save Haven: Protecting Venezuelan Migrants in Colombia. https://www.crisisgroup.org/latin-america-caribbean/andes/colombia-venezuela/hard-times-safe-haven-protecting-venezuelan
R4V Inter-agency Coordination Platform for Refugees and Migrants from Venezuela. Refugees and Migrants from Venezuela. https://www.r4v.info/en/refugeeandmigrants
R4V Interagency Coordination Platform for Refugees and Migrants in Venezuela. Regional Survey on Evictions of Refugees and Migrants from Venezuela, R4V Protection Sector, 2020. https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/fc308b616de34a129c86f0d658f2ccd3
R4V Interagency Coordination Platform for Refugees and Migrants in Venezuela. (2021) Risk of Homelessness and Evictions Rising among Venezuelan Refugees and Migrants. https://reliefweb.int/report/colombia/risks-homelessness-and-evictions-rising-among-venezuelan-refugees-and-migrants.
UN Habitat. (2000). The Right to Adequate Housing – Factsheet 21. P. 3-27
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