History
In lieu of history, we reproduce here an article that appeared in the Spring 2012 issue of our newsletter. (Please note that the present is a different version than the one published)
Developing our human rights framework,
by Sally Leigh
In November 2008, I was moved to tears when more than 200 names of people with a recent history of homelessness who had died in London over the past year, were read out during the annual Service of Commemoration. The service is developed jointly by Housing Justice and St Martins in the Fields.
Over the next year, we worked to produce ‘The Rights Guide for Rough Sleepers’ with offers of time, goodwill and expertise from partner organisations: Liberty, Z2K, The Pavement Magazine, The Salvation Army, Women at the Well, and The Simon Community. The booklet outlined the rights of rough sleepers during arrest, stop and search and no-drinking zones. The launch of this booklet started the development of a Housing Justice human rights framework.
As London Coordinator, I was asked join members of the Bloomsbury Baptist Church in the second discussion about Operation Poncho: a joint operation where commissioned outreach teams inform the City Police about the sleeping location of rough sleepers. The Police accompany street washing teams to hot-wash the sleeping spaces within the City of London with high pressure jets, causing distress and disturbance of sleep between 1-4am. The Operation dissuades rough sleepers from sleeping in the City of London and is an example of vigorous enforcement. I met representatives from the Corporation of London, Broadway, the organisation commissioned to work on outreach, and the City Police to express concern around the brutal treatment and violation of the human rights of rough sleepers.
Housing Justice successfully bid for the opportunity to partner with the British Institute of Human Rights (BIHR) on the Poverty Project, which reinforced our work within a human rights framework. The 18-month project aimed at equipping voluntary and community organisations with the tools to campaign on human rights issues, and offered human rights training to more than 30 of our partner organisations, including senior staff of Broadway.
With this background, Housing Justice were well equipped to respond when, in February 2011, Westminster Council proposed a byelaw to make it an offence both to distribute free food to homeless people through soup run provision and to sleep rough within large area of Westminster. The Director of Housing Justice was able to join in human-rights informed dialogue with local residents, members of the local authority and outreach services, volunteers from soup runs and homeless people and help find a peaceful solution to the situation. An initial victory saw the Council drop the clause making rough sleeping illegal. Our second victory was in negotiating a solution in which soup runs were voluntarily re-located into indoors venues, a process now nearing completion. This solution caught the attention of Liberty which nominated Housing Justice for a human rights award in the ‘Close to Home’ category in November 2011.
In October 2011, Housing Justice was invited to make a presentation at the Law Society of England and Wales at their two-day symposium on ‘Fairness, Justice and Human Rights: Realising economic, social and cultural rights in the UK’, which they organised in partnership with the Equality & Human Rights Commission, the Human Rights Centre and Just Fair.
Since then, Just Fair, in partnership with Doughty Street Chambers, have invited Housing Justice to become a long-term partner in a parallel reporting consortium on England’s decision to adopt the Economic and Social Rights of the Human Rights Act.
Our next project will be to highlight the issues around the basic needs of rough sleepers to access drinking water, public toilets and sanitation, food, shelter and undisturbed sleep. We plan to work with a group of homeless artists and undergraduates of Central St Martin’s School of Art to produce an art exhibition and a film, which will be available online.
