Upon UN bodies’ invitation ARC’s expert Borys Babin took part online in the side-event “Ensuring housing affordability, ending homelessness: A global challenge” held in United Nations’ Geneva Headquaters on March, 5. Side-event was held by Brasil, Germany and Finland Missions in UN with active participation of Balakrishnan Rajagopal, UN Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing and Tiina Jortikka-Laitinen, Ambassador for Human Rights of Finland, also as with presentations held by “International Union of Tenants” (IUT), “Y-Foundation”, “CityMakers Mission International”, “Pólis Institute” and “Global Cities Hub”; the topic of discussion was devoted to recent report A/78/192 of the Special Rapporteur regarding the housing affordability.
In 2023 our Association sent own submission to Dr. Balakrishnan Rajagopal for preparation of his report A/78/192 to the 78th session of the UN General Assembly. In ARC’s submission, published in 2023 on UN web-sources, the violations by Russian aggressive military machine and by occupation units the Ukrainian’s rights to housing wa described, as millions of Ukrainians, including children and older persons lost their houses due to Russian aggression, occupation of territories, such as Crimea, and related hostilities.
Now, in current discussion Professor Babin strongly supported initiatives regarding new UN resolution on housing issues that was announced at side-event, also he added that fight of ending homelessness must me correlated with countering domicide, massive destruction of houses, determined as special illegal phenomena by Special Rapporteur earlier.
Dr. Babin stressed that in ongoing interstate conflict in Ukraine Russia’s forces committed such actions as domicide as minimum in Mariupol, Bakhmut and Avdiivka now; also Syria events were mentioned also. So the discussuin regarding impact of domicide, including conflict-related domicide, on issue of homelessness will be continued in UN bodies.
