UN EXPERTS CALL FOR PROTECTION OF HOUSING RIGHTS OF HURRICANE KATRINA VICTIMS .

The UN Headquarters, New York, February 28, 2008.

United Nations experts on housing and minority rights today called on the United States Government to halt the demolition of public housing and protect the human rights of African-Americans affected by Hurricane Katrina, which battered New Orleans in 2005.

“We are deeply concerned about information we continue to receive about the housing situation of people in New Orleans, Louisiana and the Gulf Coast region,” Miloon Kothari, the Special Rapporteur on adequate housing as a component of the right to an adequate standard of living, and Gay McDougall, the Independent Expert on minority issues, said in a joint statement.

The demolition of the St. Bernard public housing development started the week of 18 February and the destruction of three other complexes were planned for the near future without meaningful consultation with the communities involved, they said.

Citing reports that there are more than 12,000 homeless people in the greater New Orleans metropolitan area, they said that the demolition of public housing, in combination with the spiralling costs of private housing and rental units, are helping to drive people, primarily African-Americans, into destitution.

Whether or not the demolitions were intentionally discriminatory, “the lack of consultation with those affected and the disproportionate impact on poorer and predominantly African-American residents and former residents would result in the denial of internationally recognized human rights,” they maintained.

The two experts said they sent a letter stating their concerns to the US Government in December 2007.

Special rapporteurs and experts are unpaid, independent specialists who monitor their area of expertise in association with the UN Human Rights Council.

{OK - the content seems to be based on facts on the ground, and the hurricane that caused that destruction may have been part of the effects of global warming caused by the emissions of CO2 into the atmosphere. The fact that Louisiana may also be an oil producing State may just be coincidental. But the reality is also that most oil producing States, strong members of the UN,  have a very similar social structure with people that became extremely rich thanks to the  mining and refining of that oil, while others are extremely poor - some of whom actually having been directly displaced from their homes by the expanding oil industry. This is the similarity - but the real dissimilarity is in the fact that the UN monitors spoke up only against the US Government, while I did not hear similar statements against the oil countries from among the front line countries of what the UN defines as the developing world. 

We think that the UN is right in pointing a finger here, we only complain about this selectivity that allows the UN to chose the target and name only the US, while being easily forgiving when it comes to other transgressors.}