Housing Rights in Reconstruction Contexts-Bridging Humanitarian Response and Recovery

This session explores the protection of housing rights in crises and reconstruction contexts. It aims to stimulate sector-wide discussion integrating humanitarian and development phases fostering best practices under a rights-based lens. Homes are deliberately destroyed in conflicts despite international law prohibiting arbitrary destruction of housing, displacement, and forced evictions highlighting the gap between legal commitments and realities on the ground. When housing is destroyed, communities are exposed to profound consequences for protection, health, livelihoods and access to essential services. The scale of destruction and damage in conflict settings is staggering: 10% in Ukraine, 65% in some regions of Myanmar, 90% in Gaza, 328,000 homes in Syria. Furthermore, other crisis contexts, including disasters, protracted fragility, displacement, climate shocks and post-crisis recovery, further expose and deepen existing housing and land rights inequalities. Administrative barriers, discriminatory policies and insecure tenure push marginalized communities into greater risk and insecurity. Many states hosting displaced populations also fail to provide adequate housing solutions, including restitution and compensation for victims of violations. When shelter is treated only as short-term emergency assistance, longer-term impacts are often locked in by default. Humanitarian actors involved in housing and reconstruction must adopt a rights-based approach centred on adequate housing. This includes meaningful community participation, addressing power imbalances, climate justice, and promoting tenure security, all essential for stabilising communities, supporting livelihoods, and advancing peacebuilding. Rights-based housing interventions strengthen other fundamental rights, including life, security, health, education, food, water, sanitation, work, social protection, gender equality and the protection of the child, family, and home. This is particularly true in climate-affected settings, where poorly planned shelter responses can entrench future vulnerability to climatic shocks. Achieving these longer-term goals requires integrating shelter assistance across the humanitarian-development agenda, i.e. the HDP nexus, avoiding silos or treated as a short-term response. Framing the conversation across conflict, fragility, climate, and recovery contexts fosters integration from emergency shelter into stable, rights based housing.