Violations Database

You have entered the HLRN Violations Database (VDB), a new interactive and participatory website feature for documenting and reviewing the world’s most-common housing and land rights violations. The VDB offers a simplified method for managing data about violations arising from actual cases of (1) forced eviction, (2) demolition, (3) confiscation and (4) privatization of public goods and services. HLRN’s coordination office has designed and initiated the VDB especially for HIC-HLRN members, but the general public is invited to participate and benefit as well.

Broadly, the VDB is a prototype service aimed at providing a unique monitoring tool that would allow respondents to record simply various violations to housing and land rights as they occur. This, in turn, will supply analysts, researchers, and human rights defenders with the necessary raw material on which to conduct cross-analyses, build cases, create reports and advocate the HRAH. The data also will integrate with the regular services and activities of HIC-HLRN advocacy, Urgent Actions, social production of habitat, training and UN cooperation.

What data to record

The VDB will track violations and corresponding losses arising from (1) forced evictions, (2) demolitions/destructions, (3) dispossession/confiscation, and (4) Privatization of public goods and services. The losses are presented in the following subcategories:

• Housing:
  • Social/public
  • Private
• Land
  • Public
  • Private
  • Communal
• Privatization of public goods and services :
  • Water
  • Energy
  • Infrastructure
  • Other(s)

It is intended that the VDB will provide several immediate advantages, including to:

• Illustrate the "violations approach" to the human right to housing;
• Offer a simplified and uniform methodology for documenting cases;
• Provide a chance to promote cases, proposed solutions and strategies;
• Give HIC-HLRN members a means to relate their experiences to each other;
• Allow other members to see at a glance what is happening on other HIC-HLRN regions;
• Produce a tool and opportunity for HLRN regional coordinators to relate to their constituents;
• Allow members to use this database to create their own databases for locally specific purposes;
• Facilitate searches from primary data to produce reports by time, location and/or type of violation;
• Devise a way for members to find partners on the basis of type of case, experience and strategy; and
• With experience at this simplified documentation exercise, users then can graduate to more-advanced methods in the HLRN Toolkit.

To access the violations database map, click here